Marie Brennan’s Turning Darkness Into Light is a delightful fantasy of manners, set in the same alternate Victorian-esque fantasy landscape as her Natural History of Dragons series.
As the renowned granddaughter of Isabella Camherst (Lady Trent, of the riveting and daring Draconic adventure memoirs) Audrey Camherst has always known she, too, would want to make her scholarly mark upon a chosen field of study.

When Lord Gleinheigh recruits Audrey to decipher a series of ancient tablets holding the secrets of the ancient Draconean civilization, she has no idea that her research will plunge her into an intricate conspiracy, one meant to incite rebellion and invoke war. Alongside dearest childhood friend and fellow archeologist Kudshayn, must find proof of the conspiracy before it’s too late.

Turning Darkness Into Light is available August 20th from Tor Books. Read an excerpt below!

STUPENDOUS FIND IN AKHIA

Newly Discovered Cache of Draconean Inscriptions Lord Gleinleigh’s Triumph“True history will be revealed at last”

Though nearly barren of water, the deserts of Akhia are a wellspring of secrets. Year by year, their sands disclose the remains of the ancient Draconean civilization, which has fascinated the public for hundreds—nay, thousands—of years.

Today they have given into the hands of mankind a priceless treasure, nearly the equal of the Watchers’ Heart itself: a tremendous cache of inscriptions, hidden by unknown hands in the deepest recesses of a cave, lost to memory until now. An expedition led by Marcus Fitzarthur, the Earl of Gleinleigh, ventured into the barren region known as the Qajr, where archaeologists had little hope of significant discovery. While sheltering from the midday heat, the earl himself found the cache, containing hundreds of tablets never before seen by modern scholars.

What hands buried them in the sheltering earth of that cave, so far from any settlement yet discovered? Was this the act of some ancient hermit or miser, protecting his library against the eyes of others? Was it an attempt to safeguard these texts against the violence of the Downfall that ended Draconean rule? We may never know, unless the words themselves give some hint to their value or origin. But the content of the tablets is as yet unknown; Lord Gleinleigh insisted on their prompt removal, before looters could flock to the site and steal away this priceless treasure. He is already making plans to bring them to his estate at Stokesley, where he has amassed one of the most extensive private collections of Draconean antiquities in the world.

When approached for comment, Simeon Cavall of the Tomphries Museum offered the following statement: “We congratulate Lord Gleinleigh on his stroke of good fortune, and hope that the world shall not find him behindhand in sharing the details of this cache with the public.”

All right, you win. Lord Gleinleigh is every bit as insufferable as you warned me. I drove through the dark just to stay at an inn, rather than accept that man’s hospitality for the night.

His private collections are every bit as stupendous as rumour claims, but it’s hard for me to admire anything when I know he must have acquired half of it in shady overseas markets, and the other half from our own shady markets here in Scirland. He is exactly the kind of customer Joseph Dorak and his ilk like to cultivate: he clearly cares nothing for the artifacts in their own right, only for the prestige they bring him, especially the Draconean materials. When I think of the bas-reliefs alone—treasures chiseled off their original homes to decorate the walls of that hulk he calls an ancestral estate, and probably smuggled onto our shores—I tell you, I could weep. The Akhian government would never have given him permission to search the Qajr if they’d had the slightest clue he would find anything of value there. Now he is in possession of what the papers insist on calling “the greatest archaeological find since the Watchers’ Heart” (bah—I’ll lay odds he bought that coverage himself), and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Buy it Now

I cannot decide whether it would be better or worse if he had any facility at all for languages. Such knowledge would give him a greater appreciation for what he has found; on the other hand, he would probably undertake to study the inscriptions himself, and undoubtedly make a botch of it, for he has not the dedication to do it well. As it stands, Lord Gleinleigh is so jealous of his find that I had to argue with him for hours before he would even let me see the whole of it, rather than a few scattered tablets—never mind that I cannot possibly be expected to deliver a well-informed judgment on the material if I have no information to judge from.

But I finally convinced him, and so here is the long and short of it.

The cache consists of two hundred seventy-one tablets or fragments thereof. Some of those fragments likely belong together; there are at least three pairs I’m certain of, but a great many more that would require further examination. If I had to guess, the final count will be closer to two hundred thirty.

Their condition is highly variable, though it’s unclear how much of that is due to botched conservation. Credit where it is due; Gleinleigh did have the sense to attend to that right away, so we hopefully shouldn’t see any more salt damage. But some of the tablets are fairly weathered (from before their burial, I imagine), and a few have suffered extensive surface crumbling, which I fear will make decipherment of those sections difficult, if not impossible.

In terms of subject matter, they’re an assortment, and I didn’t have enough time to do more than make a quick assessment. Some queen lists; a few carved into limestone that look to be royal decrees; quite a lot that appear to be completely prosaic tax records. (I sometimes think the literary production of Draconean civilization was fifty percent tax records, if not more.)

But as for the rest… yes, the rumours are true, or at least I think they are. Fourteen of the tablets are shaped to a uniform size and thickness, with what looks like the hand of the same scribe at work on them. They seem to form a continuous text, judging by the notably archaic nature of the language—it’s riddled with obsolete signs, which made assessing anything quite a challenge. What little I was able to parse at a glance seems to be a narrative. Whether Lord Gleinleigh is right to call it the “lost history of Draconean civilization” I cannot say without further examination, but it is unquestionably a breathtaking find.

And completely wasted on such a man.

However, there is hope! Given how reluctant Gleinleigh was to let me see the tablets, I thought I would have to spend months persuading him to have them translated and published. But apparently he recognizes that no one will care about what he has found five years from now unless they know what it says, because he suggested translation before I could even bring it up. What’s more, I have persuaded him that the dignity of his ancient name requires the greatest care and attention be given to these tablets. Your mind has already leapt in a certain direction, I’m sure, but I shall surprise you by steering you two generations down: I think we should recruit Audrey Camherst.

In my opinion she is easily her grandfather’s equal, where knowledge of the Draconean language is concerned. Furthermore, she has the advantage of her sex. You yourself said that Lord Gleinleigh treats every man who comes near him as either an inferior or a threat to his own prestige, neither of which would serve us well in this instance. Miss Camherst, being a woman, will not provoke him to such displays of superiority. And if he does try to throw his weight around—well, Audrey has her grandmother’s name to use as weapon and shield alike. Given that her family’s attentions are currently focused on preparing for the Falchester Congress next winter, I doubt her grandfather could spare the time and care this task would require, but Audrey would leap at the chance.

I have not yet recommended her to Lord Gleinleigh’s attention, as I think the lady deserves some amount of warning before I drop him on her doorstep. But unless you have a strong argument to the contrary, I intend to write to her as soon as possible. The world is panting to see what those tablets have to say, and we should not make them wait.

Your friend,
Simeon

From the diary of Audrey Camherst

4 pluvis

Arrived at Lord Gleinleigh’s estate today, in a torrential downpour that transformed me into a drowned rat in the brief interval between motorcar and door. Wouldn’t have happened if his footman had the common sense to keep an umbrella in the car. Bad service? Or calculation on Lord Gleinleigh’s part? I know Simeon doesn’t think the earl will feel the need to posture at me, since I’m not a man, but I am unconvinced. My impression, based on an admittedly short acquaintance thus far, is that he’s utterly delighted that the granddaughter of Lady Trent herself has come all this way to look at his tablets—but from what Simeon said Alan said, I can’t help but wonder if he fears the stories will start being all about me, instead of him. Letting me get soaked might be his way of putting me in my place.

If being put in my place is the entry fee for seeing the tablets, I will pay it. From what I hear of him, Lord Gleinleigh’s usual habit is to huddle over his find like a mother dragon brooding over her eggs. (Why is it that we still use that simile, even though Grandmama has made it clear that most of them don’t brood?) It is nothing short of a miracle that he is eager to see his new find published, and I can’t quite trust that he won’t change his mind. If he does… well, I am not above smuggling out copies of my papers, and the consequences be damned. Father will bail me out, I’m sure. Then I can look all tragic and determined for the press, who will eat it up with a spoon.

Lord Gleinleigh was taken aback when he saw me, and I don’t think it was because of my soaking. People have a tendency to forget who my mother is, even though anything our family does becomes headline news. They expect me to look Scirling, and are always surprised when I don’t.

But he recovered quickly, I will give him that much. “Miss Camherst,” he said, offering the appropriate courtesies. “Welcome to Stokesley. I am sorry your journey was so fatiguing.”

“It’s like the monsoon out there,” I said, dripping steadily onto his marble floor. “But that’s all right. I would have swum all the way here if that’s what it took. When can I get started?”

That took him aback again. “With the—My dear girl, you only just got here! I would not dream of putting you to work so soon.”

It always sticks in my craw when someone calls me “girl.” I am twenty-three, and a grown woman. But I’m likely to be a girl in everyone’s eyes until I’m grey or married. “You’re not putting me to work,” I said. “I’m putting myself. Really, I can’t wait to see the tablets. Just let me towel myself dry—”

Of course I was wasting my breath. First I had to be shown to my room. Then Lord Gleinleigh’s maid tried to insist on drawing a bath, saying I must be chilled to the bone. Which I was, a little, but I didn’t care. I did dry myself off, and then happened to glance in a mirror and discovered my hair was going every which way, as it does when the weather is damp. The maid wanted to fix that for me, but it was obvious she didn’t have the first notion how to subdue my mane. I pinned it up myself, put on dry clothes, and sallied out again in search of my host and my purpose for being there.

Only of course he had to take me on a tour of the family pile, entirely so he could show off his collection. The man has no taste! Nor any sense of order whatsoever. He has crammed Nichaean friezes around Coyahuac frescos with a monstrous great Yelangese vase in front of them so you can hardly see what’s behind. And the Draconean antiquities… I don’t think he knows or cares that he has hatching murals looming over mortuary stele in a way that would have appalled the ancients. But Simeon warned me, so I oohed and aahed as expected, and only made faces when his back was turned.

Eventually we got down to business. Lord Gleinleigh said, “I should tell you, Miss Camherst, that I have some requirements for this undertaking. If they are agreeable to you, then you may begin work tomorrow.”

No wonder he hadn’t shown me the tablets yet. Mind you, he could have had the decency to inform me about these “requirements” before I came all the way out here… but Lord Gleinleigh isn’t a complete fool. He knew it would be that much harder for me to refuse when I was in the same building as the tablets, separated from them only by a few thin walls. “I should be glad to hear your requirements,” I told him, as politely as I could.

“They are not onerous,” he promised me. “The first is that I will need you to work here, rather than removing the tablets elsewhere. I shall of course provide room and board as part of your compensation for as long as you require, and make arrangements for your belongings to be brought here.”

Live at Stokesley! I shouldn’t be surprised; it’s entirely reasonable for studying materials in someone’s private collection. But from what Simeon said, this won’t be a quick job. I’ll be here for months.

I could hardly argue, though. “Quite right. I don’t think I’ll need much; I’m used to living on ships, with all my belongings crammed into a single trunk, and most of that filled with books.”

He nodded in a way that made it clear he was entirely uninterested in my personal life. “The second is that I do not want word of the tablets’ contents leaking out until I am ready to present them in their entirety. Given bits and pieces, people will speculate and form all kinds of theories. I would rather they have the whole text at once.”

Diary, I almost squawked in frustration! Of course he wants to make a grand reveal of the whole text—and to be honest, I don’t entirely blame him. It will be much more exciting if people can read it all at once, even if the more usual thing would be to publish portions as I go along. But given the length of the main text, that means I will have to wait for ages before I can share it with the world!

Then I thought through what he had said. “When you say ‘leaking’…”

“I mean that you will not be permitted to share information about it with anyone. Not until you are done. I’m afraid I must insist on security, Miss Camherst—I’m sure you understand.”

Oh, I understand. He is a greedy old worm, that much is clear, and he doesn’t have the first idea how such things work. “But what if I run into difficulty? It’s common practice to consult with other scholars along the way.”

He affected surprise. “I was given to understand, Miss Camherst, that you are one of the brightest minds in your field. Your grandfather was a pioneer in deciphering the language, and your grandmother—well, her reputation is known around the world. Dr. Cavall at the Tomphries told me that you began studying Draconean writing when you were six. But if you need to consult with others, perhaps I should approach one of them instead.”

I went hot all over. “What I mean is—ancient texts are often very unclear. I might need to compare what you have against different tablets, things at the Tomphries or in private hands.” That’s only one of the reasons, but it was the only one I could think of that he wouldn’t hear as a confession of incompetence.

He said, “Surely you can do that without needing to divulge what you yourself have learned.”

I can; it will only be a tremendous annoyance. And yet… the alternative is to not work on these tablets at all. He knew very well how much they tempted me, and how much he had needled my pride.

So I agreed. Of course I agreed. How could I do otherwise?

“Excellent!” he said, with such heartiness that I think he may have been genuinely worried that I would refuse. “You can start work first thing tomorrow, then. I’ve even lined up an assistant for you.”

The hypocrisy of that man! First I must keep everything secret; then he drops some stranger on me, saying nothing except that I will meet her tomorrow. And before I could tell him what I thought of that, he asked me how soon I thought I could be done.

My first instinct was to laugh in his face. How can I predict such a thing without first studying the text? But I have better self-control than that, whatever Simeon says. And I have Simeon’s report on the size of the tablets, the density of the script, and its archaic cast, which is enough to make at least a rough estimate. “A great deal will depend on how obscure the text is, you understand. But from the quantity, I would guess perhaps two tablets per month.”

He was so satisfied, in fact, that I gave him a suspicious look. “I should be clear. Two tablets a month if it goes well, which it may not. And that is only for a first draft—something that gives a clear sense of the text’s meaning. Polishing it, making sure my translation is as accurate as I can achieve, will take a good deal longer.”

Lord Gleinleigh waved away my comment. “Of course—I’m sure it will need more study going forward—but the important thing is to know what it says, yes? The finer points can wait. You might be ready for publication by, say, next Gelis?”

Ten months from now. If he were only doing the simple arithmetic of seven months for fourteen tablets, he would have said Fructis; if he were speaking generally, he would have said a year or so. Gelis is both random and specific.

And I could guess why.

Maybe it would have been better for me not to have said. But I was calculating in my head, and when I got to my conclusion, it just popped right out of my mouth. “You mean, before the Falchester Congress.”

Really, I should have seen it coming. Why else would he be so eager to have someone translate these tablets, when up until now he’s hidden his collections away for the enjoyment of himself and his friends? Because the congress will be taking place next winter. Everyone will be thinking about the Draconeans then, with their delegation coming here and the future of the Sanctuary up for international debate; the translation will positively fly off the shelves.

He coughed delicately. “It would be convenient, yes.”

Not to mention profitable. With the way he spends money on antiquities, you’d assume he must be rolling in money, but I hear that lots of peers these days are having difficulty keeping up their estates. Maybe he’s gotten himself into debt. Or maybe he just wants more money to buy even more antiquities with. Either way, he’ll be able to do it, if this translation comes out on time—not to mention that he’ll be famous.

And so will I.

That shouldn’t be the first thing on my mind. I should take my time with this text, and make certain it isn’t published until I’m absolutely convinced it’s the best I’m capable of delivering—even if that means it doesn’t come out until I’m forty. Fame means nothing if later people say, “Oh, Audrey Camherst? You mean the one who wrote that sad little attempt at translation a few years ago?”

But it’s so hard when I can feel everyone looking at me, waiting to see what I’ll do. Not my family, of course; if I decided I wanted to retire to a country cottage and spend my life growing roses—not even award-winning roses; mediocre, aphid-chewed ones—they would hug me and wish me well. It’s the rest of the world that expects me to do something spectacular, because Papa did, and Mama, and Grandpapa, and above all Grandmama. When am I going to prove my right to stand with them?

I don’t have to prove anything.

Except to myself.

And I know I can do this. If it means working long hours to get it done in time… well, that’s what coffee is for.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2019/05/21/read-an-excerpt-from-marie-brennan-turning-darkness-into-light/feed/4Born to the Bladehttps://www.tor.com/2018/04/04/excerpts-born-to-the-blade-serial-box/
https://www.tor.com/2018/04/04/excerpts-born-to-the-blade-serial-box/#commentsWed, 04 Apr 2018 19:00:57 +0000https://www.tor.com/?p=351041Youth. Ambition. Power. Oda no Michiko and Kris Denn have much of the first two, and crave the last. To get it, all they must do is survive. ]]>

For centuries, the Warder’s Circle on the neutral islands of Twaa-Fei has given the nations of the sky a way to avoid war, as their chosen warders settle disputes through magical duels of blade and sigil. But that peace is on the edge of crumbling, crushed between the aggression of the Mertikan Empire and the determination of the still-free nations to not be consumed.

Twaa-Fei may be neutral, but it is also home to a million intrigues, schemes, and deadly intentions. Michiko and Kris arrive in this treacherous world together, bladecrafters eager to serve their countries—Michiko as a junior warder for Katuke, a vassal of the empire, Kris as an upstart challenging to win a seat for his home, Rumika, in the Circle. But before the young bladecrafters have even settled in, a power struggle erupts, a man’s head is parted from his shoulders, and every good thing Michiko thinks she knows about the empire comes into question.

A storm is coming, and Kris and Michiko stand at its eye. Will it bind the nations of the sky together… or tear it apart?

Born to the Blade—a new series co-written by Marie Brennan, Cassandra Khaw, Malka Older, and Michael R. Underwood—launches April 18th with Serial Box. Episode 1 is free to all, and new episodes appear weekly.

Rain cut through the forest like cannon fire.

The sound was terrifying, but it provided invaluable cover as Eriko stalked toward the castle. Reduced visibility. Covered the sound of her steps.

It was a gift from the ancestors, a sign of their approval.

* * *

Eriko spotted the first guard relieving himself off the side of the island, the open sky plunging down hundreds of feet to the Mists below.

Her blade flashed, speckled by the downpour.

He never had the chance to scream.

* * *

She pushed the guard’s body off the side. Watched it swallowed by the Mists, never to be seen again.

Clad in the guard’s armor and cloak, she continued.

* * *

The next guards were better prepared, standing back to back atop a hill along the path to the castle.

Eriko hid behind a tree and traced the sigil Chameleon’s Cloak. Silver light followed the path of her sword, snapping into place as she completed the form.

The rare purple of her Mertikan soldier’s cloak muted into greens and browns.

* * *

Eriko stalked after the fourth guard, walking the road leading to the castle. The soldier sang in a rich, full voice, some Mertikan drivel about a bird flying home through a storm. This woman might not be a killer, might be a fellow Kakutan conscript. But Eriko had made her choice.

* * *

Just inside the woods, barely out of sight, Eriko cut the Songbird, duplicating the young soldier’s voice.

She stepped out and turned the corner within sight of Vigilance Castle. The island floated two hundred feet higher than Kakute, just a quarter mile of open sky between them. It was a perfect perch from which to protect Kakute’s western edge.

And a perfect place for the prisoners the Mertikan empire wished to keep well out of the way.

* * *

Eriko stood at the gates and shouted the words “Lilac Lance!” in the young soldier’s voice. Her colleagues had gleaned the pass-phrase and guard rotation from the drunken private they’d kidnapped the week before.

The Mertikans opened the gate, and she was in.

* * *

The Golden Lord of Kakute sat in his cell, tending the flame of his spirit.

For forty years, his life had been reduced to a cell not four yards to a side, and a hallway beyond. Guards came with food, left with waste, and that was his whole world.

His last true visitor—the empress of Mertika—had come most of a decade ago. She’d regaled him with how Kakute was thriving under the empire, its children adding to the might of her navy—and of how soon his people’s warlike ways would be but a shameful memory. Her cruel smile was burned into his mind like an unending sigil. But she’d failed to break his spirit on that last visit, as she’d failed before.

The sound of a swinging door and hammering rain stole his attention away from his nightly exercises. He stood to watch a guard in a rain-drenched cloak walk inside.

“That storm is something. You’ll need this,” she said, taking off the cloak. As she held it out to the waiting guard, the normal night became something else.

The flash of a sigil filled the room, and with uncanny speed, the newcomer’s blade slashed across the necks of both guards. The two slumped to the floor, dead.

She pulled keys from one guard’s belt and unlocked the Golden Lord’s cell.

“Quick, change into the uniform,” she said. “There’s a cart just outside and to the left. The pass-phrase is ‘remembrance.’”

She swung the door open. For a moment the Golden Lord thought he was dreaming.

But this was real. He traded clothes, and as he strapped on one of his jailer’s side-swords, an emptiness more painful than hunger filled him once more. He’d lived his young life by the blade, and now he might have the chance to turn it to rescue his people.

The Golden Lord cut the sigil Enduring Mountain to refresh his stamina. With a surge of golden light, he was flush with energy, more alive than he had felt in ages. The blade nearly called for him to do more, but instead he resheathed the sword. There was little time.

“Keep the cloak up, and don’t answer anyone but Toku, the driver. He’s wearing a golden sword pin. Now go!”

She chose to die. For him. She’d seen perhaps twenty years. Old enough to be dangerous, young enough to throw away her life for a history she never knew.

“What is your name, child?”

Her voice shook. “I am Hideyama no Eriko.”

Hideyama. She was from the south. He remembered those mountains. That view. “I will remember you, Eriko.”

And then he beat his escape. It was all he could do not to break into a sprint. Hood up and head down, he was indistinguishable from the other guards, especially in this downpour. He wished to throw his cloak back, let the rain wash away his captivity, but he could not afford to be sentimental now.

Fifty yards into the woods, he saw a blurred glint of moonlight on gold.

The sword pin.

“Remembrance,” he called into the stormy night. A horse stirred. A man his age, maybe sixty-five years, emerged from the brush to wave him over to a hidden cart.

* * *

They came for her quickly. Bad luck, poor timing . . . the reason didn’t matter.

The first two she caught by surprise.

Then two more. One caught her across the arm before she ran him through.

The two made their way through the muddied forest and onto the road, cloaks pummeled by the rain.

Toku explained the rest of the plan. “There is a Kakute ship waiting, nestled in the mantle of the island. The captain is loyal. Stay in the hold; I’ll take care of everything. We can make Twaa-Fei within a week. From there, we rally the people.”

The Golden Lord clapped Toku on the shoulder. “I wish I could see the empress’s face when she receives news of what you’ve done here today. You make your ancestors proud.”

An explosion rocked the cart.

The Golden Lord looked back. A plume of unnatural fire erupted fifty feet into the air. Then an entire corner of the castle collapsed, spreading a wave of dust.

The driver nodded. “For Kakute. We must hurry.”

* * *

That night, one martyr with a blade and one driver with a horse-drawn cart changed the course of history. Together they cast a stone whose ripples would spread across the skies and touch all of the nations that lived above the Mists.

Chapter 1Michiko

Oda no Michiko watched the navigator of the Silver Sparrow at work in the pink skies of the morning.

The navigator’s blade was a plain but functional greatsword. She guided the ship with practiced grace, her blade carving great sweeping sigils in the air that wrapped around her in all directions, igniting in shimmering white upon completion. She used mostly Soaring Eagle to keep the ship aloft, but also Turning Stone to navigate and Enduring Mountain to replenish her endurance.

Michiko had learned the sigils for flying a ship early on, but left them behind when she found her passion for dueling.

When the navigator was satisfied with the ship’s course and the strength of the sigil keeping it aloft, she finished her form and nodded to Michiko, yielding the aft deck. She’d continue her work on the foredeck while Michiko drilled.

Michiko drew her own sword—a slim cut-and-thrust blade with a swept hilt—and began her forms. She started slow to shake loose the soreness from sleeping in an unfamiliar bed.

As she practiced, her thoughts drifted to the promise of the journey’s completion.

In Twaa-Fei, she would be Michiko, Junior Warder, honored daughter of Kakute. Loyal bladecrafter of the Mertikan empire. She would forge a beautiful tomorrow for her people.

It could not come soon enough.

In the three weeks since she’d won the Cherry Blossoms Tournament, her life had been like the breath between stillness and a lunge. She knew her moment was coming; all she had to do was wait and seize the opportunity when it came.

Now it was here, and she could not wait for the next step. Arriving in Twaa-Fei. Meeting Master Kensuke and the other warders. Testing her mettle against the best and brightest from the other nations.

She took a long breath. Patience was one of the great virtues. She would not let ambition and eagerness overshadow the power of this moment, what it meant to her people. Proof of Kakute’s worth in the empire.

Soon the ship would be stopping in Rumika.

After the governor had offered Michiko the position of junior warder, his attendant had given her a package with carefully copied reports rolled up in a scroll case, bound by a lock that could only be opened by the pommel of her blade. The reports said this much: Rumika had selected a candidate to challenge for a seat at the embassy. Kris would face the Gauntlet, a series of bladecraft duels with representatives of each nation, thereby seeking to earn their votes to make Kris the first warder of Rumika. It was not an unexpected move, given the turn in Rumika’s fortunes, economy booming thanks to an innovation in processing and enchanting aerstone.

For centuries, Rumika had kept mainly to themselves, trading as necessary but not often traveling abroad. But with their new, mysterious breakthrough with aerstone, Rumika had spread their wings and taken to the sky.

Where people from Kakute were born with the birthright to be able to speak with their ancestors, and true Mertikans the ability to remember their past lives, Rumikans’ birthright involved changing bodies between male-coded and female-coded forms. Some did it as regularly as changing clothes or hairstyles, some changed on their birth days, and others, like Kris, followed a schedule based on religious beliefs. Some changed their pronouns when they changed their bodies; some did not.

Kris’s arrival on the ship would give Michiko the opportunity to prepare her own report, a measure of this aspirant and what challenge Kris might present to the empire. She could begin her work for Mertika even before the ship ported in Twaa-Fei.

* * *

The Sparrow made its stop in Rumika that afternoon, taking on three more passengers. Two were attendants: one older, slim, with silver hair and pale features. The second was young, with wide shoulders and light brown skin.

The third was a striking youth around Michiko’s age or maybe a shade older, perhaps twenty. Their skin was the color of mahogany and they had long black hair, tied into a loose tail. They wore a tightly boned bodice and a flowing skirt with a tail tied up and around their waist like a belt, and carried a blade that looked valuable enough to feed a small household for a year, a sword even more fine than her own. Its wielder could only be Kris Denn, the aspirant.

After the captain greeted the Rumikans, Michiko glided across the deck toward them.

“Hello and welcome. I am Oda no Michiko, appointee to be Junior Warder of Kakute. Might you be Kris Denn?”

Kris regarded Michiko, taking in her clothes and her sword. They smiled.

“I am,” Kris said. Their voice was a rich, melodic alto. Kris bowed elaborately at the hip. “A great pleasure to meet you, Michiko. This is Alyx, my seneschal, and Nik, my valet.” Kris gestured to the silver-haired elder and then the strapping youth. The two nodded in turn.

Michiko gave the Rumikan a crisp, shallow bow and nodded to the attendants. “Pleased to meet you all.”

]]>https://www.tor.com/2018/04/04/excerpts-born-to-the-blade-serial-box/feed/1How Your RPG Campaign Can Inspire Your Novelhttps://www.tor.com/2017/06/23/how-your-rpg-campaign-can-inspire-your-novel/
https://www.tor.com/2017/06/23/how-your-rpg-campaign-can-inspire-your-novel/#commentsFri, 23 Jun 2017 16:00:59 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=274078I’m sometimes startled to realize how many of the stories I’ve written have their roots in a role-playing game. They’re by far the minority among my published works, but even so: depending on how you count it, one novel series, one novella series, a novelette, and three short stories have been shaped in some fashion […]]]>

I’m sometimes startled to realize how many of the stories I’ve written have their roots in a role-playing game. They’re by far the minority among my published works, but even so: depending on how you count it, one novel series, one novella series, a novelette, and three short stories have been shaped in some fashion by my RPG experiences. If you include unpublished works, the list increases by at least two more novel series and another short story.

I say “depending on how you count it” because the nature of that influence varies from work to work. Nothing I’ve written is a direct retelling of a whole game. Some make use of pretty significant elements; one is barely related at all, being an idea that sprang sideways out of my character concept and thereafter had nothing to do with it. The process of adaptation changes based on what bit of the game you’re using as your springboard: a setting, a character, a plot. If you’re minded to adapt your own game experiences in some fashion, it can help to look at it from those angles and figure out what you’re dealing with—so let’s dig into each possibility in turn.

A Disclaimer: Before we get started, though, let me make clear: this post will largely be focused on the craft challenges of such an adaptation. As some of you probably know, there’s another dimension to consider, which is the legal one. An RPG is not a solo endeavor; it involves other players, a GM, game designers, setting writers, and so on, and that means copyright may be involved. This is a complicated issue, and I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to attempt to lay down any clear-cut advice in that regard; if you think you might be treading on such ground, I recommend you consult an IP lawyer for real counsel. But as my own experience shows, I don’t think such considerations automatically mean that RPG material can never be reworked as fiction, as long as you go about it the right way.

“The right way” should also be “the ethical way.” Even if your fellow players don’t have copyright on their contributions to the game, you still have an ethical obligation to respect their creative efforts. There’s a running thread throughout the rest of this essay, which is that whatever the core of your adaptation is, you should do as much as you can to change everything else—to come up with your own ideas, your own backstory, your own cosmology to underpin the world and outward flourishes to relate it to the reader. If you want to keep an element that originated with another player, talk to them first. Don’t just re-use their ideas without permission. Even if it’s legal, it isn’t very nice. And why would you want to risk a friendship over something like that?

With that said, on to the approaches!

Setting

Re-using the setting of a game for later fiction is either the easiest or most difficult form of adaptation, depending on the sense in which you mean it.

The easy road is the one that departs from a setting you made up yourself. The GM who invents a whole world in which to play out a story is proverbial; in fact, some of them already plan to employ that setting for short stories or novels, and are using the game as a way to flesh it out or share their ideas with others. If you’re the one who made up the world, awesome! Rock on with your creative self! Because the ideas are your own, there’s nothing stopping you from using them again elsewhere. I did something along these lines myself once; the world of the short story “A Mask of Flesh” is based on the research I did into Mesoamerican folklore for a Changeling: The Dreaming game. Remove the human side, leaving only the folklore, and I had a ready-made society of monkey-people and jaguar-people and feathered serpents, whose political structure and social customs were entirely my own work.

But what if the ideas aren’t your own? What if you were just a player, and your GM is the one who made up the world? The answer to that is between you, your GM, and your ethics. If the creator is cool with it, you can in theory go ahead and use their setting for stories—but you risk a minefield later. What if you write a novel and it becomes a bestseller? Shouldn’t you, in good conscience, share some of that wealth with them? What if they want to write their own books in that world, after you’ve already staked a public claim? I believe that second scenario is akin to the one Steven Erikson and Ian C. Esslemont found themselves in with the world of Malazan; it was a joint creation from day one, and they agreed to each publish their own series based on their game, in consultation with each other. You may not wind up in so intense of a collaboration, but if you want to use a world one of your friends invented, I highly recommend that you write out and sign an equitable agreement beforehand… however you may define “equitable” in those circumstances. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll avoid hard feelings later, but at least it reduces the risk.

When it comes to a setting made up by a company instead of a personal friend of yours, though, you’re scaling a pretty difficult mountain. Unless you’re writing licensed tie-in fiction for Paizo or White Wolf or Chaosium or whoever, that whole “equitable agreement” approach isn’t really an option. And while many elements that may appear in game settings are public domain—nobody owns the copyright on the general idea of vampires or faeries or space marines—the specific versions you see in those settings are not free for the taking. So if you’ve fallen in love with a game setting and really want to write a publishable piece of original fiction that takes place there, you’re going to have to break out the file and get to work on those serial numbers.

Which is, I’ll admit, easier said than done. The elements of a setting are interwoven with each other, and they create the flavor you’ve fallen in love with. You have to break that flavor into its component ingredients, so to speak, and figure out which ones you love the most, then—to run this cooking metaphor into the ground—invent a new dish to use them in. If what you love about Legend of the Five Rings is the moral dilemmas posed by the code of bushido, can you write a historical fantasy set in Japan instead? Or come up with a similar-but-not-identical moral code, and then create a society that follows such a code? If instead you’re really attached to the Spirit Realms, can you keep that part while replacing the human side of things wholesale? If what you love about the setting is the warring factions, each with its own strong personality, can you make a different, non-Japanese-inspired society with a similar political matrix? It will be tempting to carry a lot of details along for the ride, dividing each faction into a group of families and giving each family its own special techniques that —

Resist. Resist. Make yourself come up with something equally cool to take the place of those details. Keep only the ones that you really and truly love the most, the ones that inspire you to tell your own stories, and then set them like jewels in a crown of your own forging. Let the rest stay where it belongs.

But what if you can’t do that? What if you have a story you really want to tell, but it will only work if you use a very specific combination of worldbuilding details that are unmistakably derived from a copyrighted setting?

Then you have to accept that it will remain in the realm of gaming, fanfiction, or licensing. I adore the mythical history of the United States I came up with for my Scion campaign, but it fundamentally doesn’t work unless new gods start out as the heroic, half-mortal children of other gods, and Columbia and Britannia and Marianne are all former Scions of Athena who ascended to full divinity, and the enemies of the gods are creatures called Titans who are more like the elemental planes of whatever concepts they represent but they have Scion-like avatars who can act directly in the world. If all I needed was one of those factors, I could probably find a way to make it stand alone, but with all three? That’s a Scion story, and there’s no use pretending it’s anything else. Unless the owners and creators of Scion hire or encourage me to write a story in their world, I just have to live with my happy memories of the game, and be content with that.

Character

By far the majority of my RPG adaptations have, at their root, been driven by character.

This is probably because almost every instance of me adapting an RPG into fiction has sprung out of the experiences I had as a player, instead of as a GM. In fact, I become much more strongly invested in my RPG characters than I generally do with those in the fiction I write, because my PC is the primary conduit through which I experience and influence the story. I perform their speech and behaviors; I think intensively about the things they want, the things they fear, their backstory and what they prefer to do with their spare time. I get to know my PCs much better than I could possibly know every NPC in a game I’m running, or every character in a story I’m writing. Is it any wonder that they’re so prone to lingering in my brain for years afterward?

The good news is, character-based adaptations can work really well, because your inspiration is often flexible. To be sure, no character is an island: their personality and life history are bound up in the setting they live in and the story you told about them the first time around. But if what you’re interested in keeping is the backstory or the personality or the emotional arc or something else of that sort, you can often transplant that root quite effectively, putting your Pathfinder paladin into some Dune-style space opera or your Changeling eshu into a secondary world. (The same thing is true in reverse: I once played a character who was basically Himura Kenshin as a transgender vampire.)

Here the question you have to ask yourself is, who is this character? Not their whole story, not every little thing that ever happened to them, but their core, the sine qua non of their identity. You can put Sherlock Holmes into the modern United States or Tang China or even make him a medical doctor instead of a detective, and he’ll still feel recognizably like Holmes if he has a mind like Holmes’ and uses it to solve puzzles that baffle everyone else. If Holmes, to you, is defined instead by a violin and a cocaine habit, then give him those things (or period/regional equivalent) and forget about the analytical ability. You’re the only one who can say what’s essential to the character, and what’s optional—and what you need to build around those bits in order to make them work.

But make sure that whatever you build still works in its own right. I have a trunked YA novel that’s inspired by a character I played in a tabletop White Wolf game, a popular teenaged girl who discovers her popularity is due to her being a telepath and unconsciously reading/influencing those around her. There were some other details from the game I really wanted to keep, things about her family history and relationships with the people in her life… but I did a really terrible job of coming up with reasons for those things that weren’t the ones we used in the game. (For example, replacing a vampire boyfriend with a guy who wound up immortal by a different, insufficiently-defined path.) The novel’s trunked because it looks like exactly what it is, a resurrected Franken-corpse stitched together out of disparate parts that don’t quite fit together like they need to. Until and unless I can fix that, the book’s going nowhere.

Plot

Oh, plot. You knew this was coming: the big one, the all-encompassing Story that you want to retell, in its full and radiant glory.

I’ll break it to you now: you cannot make that work. Not in its entirety.

Not even if it’s set in a non-copyrighted world and you have the written and notarized permission of everyone who ever ran or played in that game. This isn’t an issue of ethics, not in the first instance; it’s an issue of pragmatics. To put it bluntly, a game directly transcribed into fiction is going to be a bad piece of fiction. Games don’t work like written stories; their pacing is different, their narrative techniques are different, their focus shifts differently when switching between various character and plotlines. Events in games happen because the dice said so. Characters drop out of the plot and then reappear because a player was out of town. People often criticize movie adaptations for altering the story from the novel, but the truth is, that’s necessary; what works in one medium falls flat in another. Whether you’re going from book to movie or movie to book, you have to play to the strengths of your medium, rather than trying to approximate the techniques of the source. The same is true here.

As with any other kind of game adaptation, you have to decide what it is you really care about. When I was writing the novelette “False Colours”, I knew I wouldn’t try to include the entire one-shot LARP it came from; as with any LARP, I was wildly ignorant of half the plotlines (which coincidentally included every plotline where magic was involved), and trying to replace them would only take the narrative attention away from the story I really wanted to retell. My goal was to recreate the serendipitous moment where, just when my allies were secretly formulating a plot to help me escape my problems by faking my death, I accidentally got shot by my own captain. If the LARP was a tapestry, that was a single thread pulled from the fabric. Then, having pulled it, I ditched everything involving magic and espionage and mummies rising from the dead, and set about weaving an entirely new cloth around that thread.

This approach poses the biggest ethical complications, when it comes to respecting the contributions of other people. You can make up a setting or thoroughly revamp an existing one and do just fine, and a character exists so much in your own head that, while other PCs and NPCs may have had an influence on them, you can still consider what you’re working with to be your own creation. But plot? Plot is a collaborative thing. It’s exceedingly difficult to use it in any great detail without bringing in the actions—which is to say, the creative efforts—of your GM and fellow players.

The further you let yourself stray from the source, the easier a time you’ll have of it. I say that “Love, Cayce” is inspired by a game I played in, but the inspiration consists of “the children of a bunch of adventurers grow up to be adventurers themselves and then write letters home about the crazy things they’ve been doing.” The plot-based resemblances more or less end at the first line: “Dear Mom and Dad, the good news is, nobody’s dead anymore.” But when I wrote “False Colours,” it wasn’t just about my cross-dressing naval lieutenant; it was also about her best friend and her love interest and her captain and our GM, the backstory we’d all invented together and the actions we took during the game. I went to greater lengths with that story to obtain permission from my fellow players than I did with any other adaptation I’ve attempted to date, and I won’t be surprised if it continues to hold that record for the rest of my career.

A Closing Exhortation

The common theme throughout this post has been “figure out what you need to keep, and then change everything else.” Which leaves one final step: be willing to change the essentials, too.

I’m not saying you have to. After all, there was some bright spark that made you want to write this story; I’m not going to tell you to extinguish it. But you may very well find, as you’re working on your draft, that even those bits you thought were essential aren’t quite. The new ideas you came up with have developed their own momentum, leading you in directions that aren’t the one you originally planned for. Be willing to go with that momentum—the same way you would if the plot of a game you were playing in took an unexpected turn. Gustav Mahler defined tradition as “the preservation of fire, not the worship of ashes,” and the same concept applies here. Don’t ossify the original game material; let it grow and change to fit the rest of what you’ve built around it.

And have fun. There’s a special pleasure in reworking an idea, like a musician remixing an older song; if all goes well, then in the end you have two great songs to listen to.

This article was originally published in October 2016.

Marie Brennan is the author of multiple series, including the Lady Trent novels, the Onyx Court, the Wilders, and the Doppelganger duology, as well as more than forty short stories. The Varekai series of novellas—Cold Forged Flame and Lightning in the Blood—are is available June 6th from Tor.com Publishing. More information can be found at her website.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2017/06/23/how-your-rpg-campaign-can-inspire-your-novel/feed/5Forget the Horoscope; Try These 5 Methods of Divinationhttps://www.tor.com/2017/06/01/forget-the-horoscope-try-these-5-methods-of-divination/
https://www.tor.com/2017/06/01/forget-the-horoscope-try-these-5-methods-of-divination/#commentsThu, 01 Jun 2017 17:00:20 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=267524Prophecy shows up all the time in fantasy, but divination is less common. And yet, if you look at history, people all over the world used different forms of divination to guide their lives, for decisions ranging from when to set out on a trip to selecting the right person to marry. When divination does […]]]>

Prophecy shows up all the time in fantasy, but divination is less common. And yet, if you look at history, people all over the world used different forms of divination to guide their lives, for decisions ranging from when to set out on a trip to selecting the right person to marry.

When divination does show up in a story, it almost always takes the form of cards, whether the familiar tarot or an invented deck inspired by it. Every so often you’ll get a reference to astrology, or possibly the casting of runes. But there are so many more possibilities—some fairly comprehensible, others much less so…

Oracle bones

During the Shang and Zhou dynasties in China, diviners would use either the scapula bones of oxen or the plastron (belly shell) of a turtle to answer their clients’ questions. They carved pits or drilled holes in the flat surface, then wrote the question on it, either via carving or painting. Once the surface was ready, they touched the pits with a heated rod until the material cracked. Because of this, the method is often called scapulimancy (divination using shoulder-blade bones), plastromancy (divination using plastrons), or pyromancy (a broader term for types of divination that use fire).

So how does this answer the client’s question? Via the cracks in the bone… and that’s about all we know. What systems they used to interpret those marks—what constituted an auspicious answer vs. an unfavorable one—no one has yet been able to discover. We can probably assume that it depended as much on the political climate as on any system, though, because it has always been in a diviner’s interest to pay attention to the context of the question.

Entrails

On the rare occasions this shows up in fiction, it’s usually the work of an evil witch or other malevolent character. But haruspicy (also called extispicy), divination by the examination of entrails, goes back at least to Babylon, and it was common in ancient Rome. The haruspex would sacrifice an animal—often a sheep or a chicken—and then study the liver or other viscera to determine what the portents said.

As with oracle bones, we don’t have a terribly clear idea of how a lump of organ meat could answer questions. There’s an artifact called the Liver of Piacenza that gives us some clues; it’s a bronze life-sized model of a sheep’s liver, inscribed with the names of Etruscan deities. Presumably if one feature was larger or discolored in some fashion, that meant it was significant, and the association with a deity would give you some sense of what the message was. But you’d need to be pretty familiar with anatomy before you could tell one lump of meat from another!

Books

The Christian Church often looked askance at many kinds of folk divination, considering them superstition at best, witchcraft at worst. But others could be quite acceptable—like bibliomancy, aka divination with books.

Or rather, with a book. Take the Bible or some other suitably important text (medieval Christians were also known to use Virgil’s Aeneid) and open it to a random page. The first words your gaze falls upon are your answer: a message from God, whose relevance to your question you must then interpret. The I Ching is a more complex form of this method, using coins or yarrow stalks to better randomize the selected text; otherwise a book was too likely to fall open to a frequently-read passage.

Chickens

Birds often played a role in divination, with augurs reading omens out of the patterns of their flight or other behavior. But my favorite version of this is alectryomancy, divination by roosters: you set out grain and observed how the birds pecked at the grain. During the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, the naval commander Publius Claudius Pulcher consulted the sacred chickens on board his ship . . . and they refused to eat at all. In an attempt to reassure his crew, he reportedly said, “Since they won’t eat, let them drink!” and chucked them into the sea.

He proceeded to lose the Battle of Drepana.

Moral of the story: don’t throw the sacred chickens overboard.

Counting the Days

I’ve made use of this one in my novella Lightning in the Blood. It makes use of the Mayan ritual calendar, the tzolkin, which consists of twenty day names and thirteen day numbers, constantly cycling. Each day name has its own associated spirit or deity, a Day Lord, with associated meanings. A daykeeper, a Mayan diviner, lays out an arrangement of seeds and counts through them with the calendar; the Day Lords respond with a sensation described as “blood lightning,” an electrical feeling in the daykeeper’s body. Based on the location and movement of that feeling, the Day Lord in question, and the number of the day (a higher number is more violent and dangerous), the diviner answers the client’s question. It’s a complex system, but much more comprehensible to the modern mind than the inscrutable cracks in an ancient turtle shell or the shape of a sheep’s liver.

There are countless other methods of divination, ranging from myomancy (observing the behavior of rats or mice) to the magic 8-ball. All of them are attempts to reduce uncertainty, to answer the questions that constantly plague us: What should I do? Is this a good idea? What will the future bring?

I don’t know. But maybe the chickens do.

Marie Brennan is the author of multiple series, including the Lady Trent novels, the Onyx Court, the Wilders, and the Doppelganger duology, as well as more than forty short stories. Lightning in the Blood, the second novella in the Varekai series, is available June 6th from Tor.com Publishing. More information can be found at her website.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2017/06/01/forget-the-horoscope-try-these-5-methods-of-divination/feed/15How to Do Karate in a Victorian Dresshttps://www.tor.com/2017/05/03/how-to-do-karate-in-a-victorian-dress/
https://www.tor.com/2017/05/03/how-to-do-karate-in-a-victorian-dress/#commentsWed, 03 May 2017 14:00:21 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=264607When Mary Robinette Kowal and I were on tour together, she asked me to record something for a charity fundraiser: a video of me performing a karate kata in the Victorian dress I wore for our tour events. Being an author, of course I said yes. Because it immediately made me wonder—what would that be […]]]>

When Mary Robinette Kowal and I were on tour together, she asked me to record something for a charity fundraiser: a video of me performing a karate kata in the Victorian dress I wore for our tour events.

Being an author, of course I said yes.

Because it immediately made me wonder—what would that be like? How well could I do karate in that dress? What sorts of difficulties would I run into? And how could I make use of this experience in a story someday? I had some suspicions, but without putting them to the test, I couldn’t be sure. Mary and I were on the way to our next event when she made the request, so after we arrived and got into costume, I decided I would take a moment to walk through a simple kata as a preliminary test.

I got one move in and discovered that the biggest limitation was one that had never even crossed my mind.

It wasn’t the skirt.

When you talk about this kind of thing, most people’s minds go first to the skirt. After all, that’s the most obvious difference between men’s clothing and women’s. And let’s be clear: a skirt is something of a liability when fighting. The kata I chose to perform has only one kick in it, at the very end; that was a deliberate choice on my part, because any time I pick my foot up, I risk catching my heel in the hem on the way down. This might cause me to stumble, or possibly even rip the hem and create an ongoing trip hazard for the rest of the fight.

But contrary to what movies would have you believe, kicks aren’t a huge part of most practical fighting. They’re slow—which means your opponent has more time to see you coming and do something about it—and they put you in an unstable position, balancing on one foot, vulnerable to being knocked down. So the fact that kicks in a dress are hazardous isn’t as big of a deal as you might think. On the other hand, if you wind up on the ground during the fight, the odds of restricting your own movement because you’re kneeling on your skirt? Those are much higher. I don’t practice Brazilian jiu-jitsu, but I suspect doing that style in a dress is a pretty bad idea.

Since my style doesn’t incorporate ground fighting, I figured my skirt wouldn’t really be much of a problem. If it created any issues, I expected them to be much subtler, with the fabric tangling around my legs as I stepped. This wouldn’t be enough to trip me or anything dramatic like that, but it could still interfere with my movement. The style of karate I practice, though, is shōrin-ryu. This emphasizes very straight, minimalist steps, almost always taking your foot in the most direct line from its current position to its new one—which turns out to be ideal when you’ve got a lot of fabric along for the ride. It’s possible I’d have more trouble if I practiced shotokan karate instead, with its sweeping, crescent-shaped steps; those seem tailor-made (if you’ll pardon the pun) for skirt troubles. As it stands, though, I have no trouble with ordinary footwork when dressed up like a late Victorian lady.

It wasn’t the corset, either.

The next most obvious candidate for sartorial difficulty is the corset. The dress I wear when on tour for the Memoirs of Lady Trent isn’t a completely period-accurate late Victorian outfit; the costumer who sewed it for me designed it look outwardly appropriate, while being a little more friendly to the life of a modern woman—particularly one who would need to carry it on airplanes and get dressed without help in the stock room of a bookstore. Because of that, it doesn’t have a corset in the traditional sense; instead it has a back-lacing sleeveless bodice and a jacket that hooks over it. Both of these have a fair amount of boning in them, though, which means the effect is much the same.

As with the skirt, I’ll grant that a corset can indeed be a liability. If the boning is made of wood or whalebone, it could get broken by a hit, which might mean your own clothing winds up stabbing you. (On the other hand, a sufficiently well-constructed set of stays would actually help armor you against slashing attacks.) A lot depends on the time period: in late seventeenth-century England, the busk at the front of the corset could extend all the way to the lady’s “honour,” which sounds like it would make even sitting uncomfortable, let alone any more vigorous movement. But if your fighting style doesn’t emphasize grappling, the fact that you can’t really bend through the waist isn’t necessarily going to be a big deal. So is the corset really a problem?

I’ll be honest with you: I thought this, not the skirt, would be the main problem. Not because I need to bend through the waist to do my kata, or even because the boning might dig in uncomfortably; once again, I expected the problem to be subtler. I’ve been studying karate for eight years, and I’ve spent that time learning how to generate force with my entire body. When I punch, it isn’t just an arm movement; the power starts with my footwork, my knees, my hips, my opposite arm, using the torque of my whole body to drive my fist forward.

Now put a cage around the middle of that equation.

I thought it would be like trying to play piano with gloves on. Sure, I can still perform the motions… but the subtlety and the fine control would be gone, muffled up by the interference of clothing. And it’s possible that’s exactly what happened. But I can’t really tell you, because any difficulty I had with my corset was instantaneously drowned out by the real problem—the one that yanked me up short before I finished even the first movement of the first basic kata.

It was the sleeves.

The sleeves? The things wrapped around your arms? How on earth could those be a bigger problem than skirts and spring steel boning?

Because of the armholes. When my seamstress was designing my costume, she told me that she would cut the jacket to be more forgiving than usual for period style, because I would need a greater range of movement through my shoulders than an actual upper-class Victorian lady would expect. Even with a more generous cut, though, my ability to move my arms in this costume is limited; I can’t raise them much above ninety degrees. And, most fatally for my ability to do karate, I can’t reach very far forward.

If you were to come to a class at my dojo, one of the most common things you would hear the sensei telling the students is, “Deep cross!” Half of our blocks begin by crossing your arms in front of yourself. We talk about folding your upper body (disregarding the fact that ribs and a sternum mean you can’t actually fold yourself in half) and then snapping open again, using that wind-up to generate power. Even when a movement doesn’t begin with a deep cross—a punch, for example—you let your shoulder come forward briefly before settling back.

Trying to do karate in that dress is like being a dog on a choke leash. Time and time again, the fabric stops me short, the satin across my upper back pulling taut and halting my movement before it’s complete. I can’t get anywhere. Or rather, I can… in a pathetic, limited manner that doesn’t carry even half of my usual force. Trying to do a deep cross in that jacket makes me feel like a T-Rex, my arms shortened to uselessness.

What’s interesting about this is that it isn’t an issue specific to women’s clothing. Men’s clothing is more likely to be forgiving in the shoulders, but not always; there have been places and time periods that favored a close-fitting silhouette, on the assumption that a gentleman isn’t engaging in the kind of vigorous labor that would make such a cut impractical. (Like a lady, he has people to do that sort of thing for him.) Men have worn corsets, too, and articles of clothing with something you might call a long skirt, but the sleeves are the point at which they’re most likely to run into trouble. When you see a man in a film taking off his coat before he fights a duel, he isn’t just protecting the nicer fabric against getting torn and dirty; he’s giving himself more freedom of movement.

See for yourself what the effect is:

I didn’t choose arakaki sochin because it’s my best kata (it isn’t), but because it has no “deep cross” moments. Despite that, those of you with an eye for martial arts may be able to tell that my punches in the opening sequence aren’t quite up to snuff, because of how the jacket stops me from really bringing my shoulder forward like I should. The rest of the kata is less affected for the most part, but there are a few points where the clothing interferes at least a little. And I paid a price for it, too: I went through the kata in full costume three times that day, once as a warm-up, and then two takes of filming, and when I changed back into modern clothing I found red marks down the fronts of my shoulders where the seams had bit in.

The Takaway

As a karateka, I’m not very pleased with my performance—but as a writer? It was a fascinating experience, one that left me with a lot of thoughts about fight scenes in fantasy novels. Clothing and behavior go in a feedback loop: if gentlemen in your invented society expect to be jumped by assassins in the street on a regular basis, they’re going to wear coats that allow a larger range of movement, because they can’t expect the enemy to wait while they shuck their restrictive outer layer. Coming at it from the other direction, if your fantasy ladies are trained to defend themselves while also looking decorative, they’ll probably learn a style much like mine, with relatively little in the way of kicks or ground fighting and straight-line movement that won’t send their skirts into a tangle.

And when it comes to the sleeves… well, I’ll let Merida show us how it’s done:

In the end, I couldn’t punch well in this kata because I didn’t want to ruin my costume. But if I were fighting for my life, that consideration wouldn’t even cross my mind. I’d move with full force and see which is stronger: my seams or my body. I’d come out the other side with a ruined jacket and some really impressive bruises along my shoulders—but at least I’d have a chance of staying alive.

This article has been revised to correct a mistake in the description of tailoring.

Marie Brennan is the author of multiple series, including the Varekai novellas, the Onyx Court, the Wilders, and the Doppelganger duology, as well as more than forty short stories. Within the Sanctuary of Wings, the fifth and final book of the Lady Trent series, is available from Tor Books. More information can be found at her website.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2017/05/03/how-to-do-karate-in-a-victorian-dress/feed/57Such Sweet Sorrow: On the Final Chapter of the Lady Trent Serieshttps://www.tor.com/2017/04/26/such-sweet-sorrow-on-the-final-chapter-of-the-lady-trent-series/
https://www.tor.com/2017/04/26/such-sweet-sorrow-on-the-final-chapter-of-the-lady-trent-series/#commentsWed, 26 Apr 2017 15:00:25 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=263929In the spring of 2016, a close friend of mine moved away. Or at least that’s what it felt like. After five years spent writing the Memoirs of Lady Trent, I finished the last book… and suddenly my protagonist wasn’t a part of my life anymore. Not the way she used to be. I still […]]]>

In the spring of 2016, a close friend of mine moved away.

Or at least that’s what it felt like. After five years spent writing the Memoirs of Lady Trent, I finished the last book… and suddenly my protagonist wasn’t a part of my life anymore. Not the way she used to be. I still think about her, of course, and now that Within the Sanctuary of Wings is in readers’ hands, she’s very much on other people’s minds. So metaphorically speaking, we’re still in contact with each other. But we don’t hang out every night like we used to.

I’ve never had this reaction to the end of a series before—but then again, my other series were different. The Doppelganger books got written five years apart, and there are only two of them in total. There are four Onyx Court novels, but they tell a less unified story; with each book taking place in a new century of English history, my faerie characters are the only ones who stick around for more than a single volume, and even then, there isn’t one protagonist for the whole series. The Wilders series does have that unity, but I haven’t written the third and final book yet.

Lady Trent? She’s different. And it isn’t just because her series is longer, though that contributes. Nor is it because I wrote all five books back to back, without a gap of years in between—though that has an effect, too.

I think the key factor is the narrative voice.

The Memoirs are written in the first person instead of third. And not just the type of first person where the “camera” is perched on the heroine’s shoulder as she goes about her life, but the type where the narrator knows she’s telling her story for an audience. I didn’t realize, when I chose to approach the first novel that way, that it would have the effect of creating a stronger connection between the character and the reader—or the character and the writer. But it means I’ve written nearly five hundred thousand words of Isabella talking to me.

Writers sometimes speak of their characters as if they were real people. It isn’t because we’re delusional; it’s because we train our minds to think of them that way. We need our characters to be vivid, three-dimensional, to give the impression of a life outside the story. How else can we tell what they would do in any given situation? Some of them wind up feeling more real than others. Lady Trent is more real to me than any other character I’ve ever written—to the point where, for the last several years, I’ve invited readers to send her letters during the month of February. And she’s real enough that quite a few readers have taken me up on that, writing letters that are amusing or thoughtful or sometimes heartbreaking. They tell her about their dreams and aspirations, the obstacles they face, their struggles with self-doubt and unsupportive family. I’ve gotten fanmail for other things I’ve written, but nothing to compare with this: people baring their hearts on the handwritten page to a woman who only exists on a page herself. I do my best to answer them; I hope it’s enough.

I look forward to the things I’m planning to write next. With this series moving into my rearview mirror, my brain is exploding with half a dozen different ideas, all clamoring for my attention.

But I’m going to miss Lady Trent. I hope she keeps in touch.

Marie Brennan is the author of multiple series, including the Varekai novellas, the Onyx Court, the Wilders, and the Doppelganger duology, as well as more than forty short stories. Within the Sanctuary of Wings, the fifth and final book of the Lady Trent series, is available from Tor Books. More information can be found at her website.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2017/04/26/such-sweet-sorrow-on-the-final-chapter-of-the-lady-trent-series/feed/7Within the Sanctuary of Wingshttps://www.tor.com/2017/04/05/excerpts-marie-brennan-within-the-sanctuary-of-wings/
https://www.tor.com/2017/04/05/excerpts-marie-brennan-within-the-sanctuary-of-wings/#commentsWed, 05 Apr 2017 19:00:56 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=262139Book 5 in the Lady Trent series. This concluding volume will finally reveal the truths behind Isabella Trent's most notorious adventure—scaling the tallest peak in the world, buried behind the territory of Scirland's enemies—and what she discovered there, within the Sanctuary of Wings.]]>

After nearly five decades (and, indeed, the same number of volumes), one might think they were well-acquainted with the Lady Isabella Trent—dragon naturalist, scandalous explorer, and perhaps as infamous for her company and feats of daring as she is famous for her discoveries and additions to the scientific field.

And yet—after her initial adventure in the mountains of Vystrana, and her exploits in the depths of war-torn Eriga, to the high seas aboard the Basilisk, and then to the inhospitable deserts of Akhia—Lady Trent has captivated hearts along with fierce minds. This concluding volume will finally reveal the truths behind her most notorious adventure—scaling the tallest peak in the world, buried behind the territory of Scirland’s enemies—and what she discovered there, within the Sanctuary of Wings.

Chapter Seven

Had we been able to land closer to the village… had our first attempt to fly west been successful… had we not been forced to evade bandits on our way to Parshe… had we only left Scirland sooner. I could list a dozen points at which we lost precious time, but it was no use wishing to have those moments back. The simple fact was that we had arrived in Hlamtse Rong too late, and now had no hope of journeying to the col before the snows made it impossible.

In my less bitter moments, I knew the delays were a disguised blessing. The monsoon that year began early, but we had no way of predicting that. Had we come to the village a week earlier, we would have set out in the cheerful confidence that we had plenty of time to conduct our research. The snows would have caught us at high elevation, far from shelter and support; we might all have died. But it was hard to weigh that hypothetical peril against my very present frustration, as I sat in the doorway of Shuwa’s house and watched the rain pour down.

Suhail sat next to me, a warm and comforting presence. Tom had gone out with Thu to speak with the village headman, but we all knew what answer they would return with: we could not set out today, nor tomorrow, nor any time in the near future. Not unless our destination lay below us, eastward, back in the direction of Vidwatha. The heights of the mountains were far too dangerous now.

“Ventis,” I said at last. I had not spoken in nearly an hour, but Suhail could follow my thoughts well enough. “Three months; that is how long they say the monsoon lasts.” Assuming it did not overstay its welcome, as it had shown up too soon.

“You want to wait,” Suhail said. “Attempt the search between the monsoon and the onset of winter.”

Somewhere out there, Chendley and the villagers were toiling back toward us with a pile of equipment. “If we do not, this entire journey has been wasted. It would be one thing if I could be sure of trying again later—then it would only be resources and time we have thrown away. But do you really think anyone will loan us another caeliger? That the Tser-zhag government will not have tightened its watch, or the Yelangese overrun this place?” I did not speak of the thing we had come here for, the way our odds of success decreased with every passing day. If uncovered, it might rot; if entombed in fresh snow, we might never find it. I had gambled on the chance of discovery, and like a bettor desperate to make good his losses, I refused to walk away from the table.

Three months rotting in Hlamtse Rong, waiting. Hoping.

A chorus of mewing came from a nearby house. A Nying woman, cursing, used a broom to drive out several draconic figures that had evidently taken up residence among her livestock.

Suhail turned to me, grinning. “What ever will you do to keep yourself occupied?”

Shuwa and her fellow villagers looked at us as if we were mad when we expressed our intention to study the mews.

I have of course encountered this reaction many a time—but never more so than in Hlamtse Rong, where the dragons in question were nothing more than vermin. Rock-wyrms and desert drakes may prey upon livestock, earning the enmity of the local humans, but their grandeur also commands re spect. Mews enjoyed no such reputation. They were simply pests, no more admired in Tser-nga than stoats are in Scirland. (Indeed, less so, for they provide no fur.)

Chendley looked at us in much the same way after he returned. In democratic fashion, we held a vote: only the lieutenant was in favour of abandoning this whole matter as a bad job, and his strenuous arguments did nothing to sway the rest of us—though in fairness I should note that his arguments were good ones. It is not his fault they lacked the power to penetrate our thick skulls and effect any change within. We would stay in Hlamtse Rong until the monsoon ended, and make our attempt then.

In the meanwhile, we would study the dragons we had on hand. Inquiries around the village revealed that the hunting of mews, if the enterprise can be given so grand a name, is the domain of unmarried spinsters—of which there are more than a few, what with husbands being distributed in sibling batches. A wife who finds mews plaguing her house hold calls for assistance, and the spinster in question builds and lays traps for the creatures in areas which attract their attention, such as kitchen stores and refuse pits.

“You are not a spinster,” Shuwa said to me (as translated by Thu). “Why on earth would you be interested in this?”

I searched for a diplomatic phrasing, then gave up; anything I said would be put through the grinder of linguistic differences regardless. “Please tell her,” I said to Thu, “as politely as you can, that perhaps I may learn something that will help the Nying keep the mews at bay? Without suggesting that I think their own efforts have been deficient—after all, they’ve lived with the creatures for generations. But I have studied many kinds of dragons in other parts of the world, and it might be that the comparison will shed some useful light on the matter.”

What Thu said to Shuwa, I have no idea. I only know that after a few minutes of back-and-forth she gave up on understanding his meaning, or my intentions, at all. Shaking her head, she merely said that if we wished to do something with the mews, it was our own lookout.

Tom and I began with their thieving behaviour, which did not require us to go any farther afield than a few houses in the village—though it did cost us some sleep. We sat up through the night on multiple occasions, observing how the mews raided store houses, larders, and livestock pens. They proved to be cunning beasts, often sending one of their number ahead as a scout before descending to scavenge. Or perhaps that one might better be called a canary: if the advance mew is captured by a trap, it squawks a warning, and the others flee. “It might be more effective if the trap could be sprung upon them en masse,” I said to Tom.

“Yes, but how? It would require someone to sit up at night, in every place the mews might scavenge, and spring the trap by hand.”

Given the number of possible locations, such a requirement was utterly impractical. But under the current approach, I suspected that each incident only taught the mews how better to avoid traps in the future. One of the spinsters we talked to, an old woman named Kyewa, agreed with this theory. A congenital deformity that twisted her legs from birth had ended her marriage prospects before they began, but she made very fine traps, and was careful to use different kinds in a rotating sequence. According to Thu, she did this so the mews might have time to forget past traps and become vulnerable to them again.

“Now that would be a fascinating thing to test,” I murmured, as much to myself as to Tom. “Perhaps we could try laying out only two different kinds of trap in alternating sequence, then three, then four, to establish whether mews truly do learn from their errors, and if so, how long it takes them to forget those lessons.”

Alas for my curiosity, the Nying would not hear of any experimentation that might cause them to lose more of their stores to the little dragons. I understood their reluctance, for they often walked too close to the edge of starvation to gamble with their future in such fashion; and we certainly could not squander any of our own food, for we were saving as much of that as possible for our autumnal expedition. In the meanwhile, Chendley, Suhail, and Thu (when we could spare him) lent their aid to the herdsmen, and hunted as much as they could. Our continued residence in Hlamtse Rong depended heavily on our not becoming a burden to them.

Tom and I spent some time with the herdsmen as well, watching the diving behaviour of the mews. Suhail had devoted long hours to improving his own command of Tser-zhag, and put his growing skill to use in questioning the men about the little dragons. He said, “They all agree that mews eat the fat out of the yaks’ humps, but I’ve taken a look at the beasts, and I haven’t found a single one with scars or any other sign of chewing.”

“It might be an old wives’ tale,” Tom said. “On Niddey, the grannies all agree that cats have to be kept away from infants, because they’ll suck their breath away. I’ve seen a cat sniff a baby’s face, but no more—and certainly we’ve seen mews dive at yaks, which could be exaggerated in the same way.”

“But why on earth do they do that in the first place?” I tapped my fingers against my elbows, musing. The day was a bright one, and the alpine meadow around me dotted with flowers; at moments like this, it was hard to believe that bad weather was keeping us from our goal. The typical Anthiopean concept of the monsoon is a period in which it rains twenty-four hours a day, but even in the wettest regions, this is not the case. We had sunshine on an intermittent basis—along with enough rain to transform the hardpacked trail through the center of the village into a river of mud. I had only to look up at the wall of the high peaks, though, to be reminded of why we were passing the time with mews.

Tom was still pondering my question, rather than the weather. “Scavenging?” he said doubtfully. “Do they ever drive yaks into stampeding over a cliff edge? They might be hoping to feast on carrion.”

Suhail asked on our behalf, but turned up no reports of such a thing. “Which could be due to the vigilance of the herdsmen,” he said. “They do seem to be concerned that the mews will frighten a beast into injuring itself, if not falling to its death.”

After another week spent in observations, we had no better answers. “Perhaps it is a kind of play behaviour,” I said. “Like a cat toying with a mouse. The mews may simply find it entertaining to make a yak run.”

We had greater luck in our other endeavour, which was the trapping of a mew—not to kill it, as the locals do, but for study. Even this was not so easily done; as I have said, mews are quite clever about learning to avoid traps. We caught one the second night we tried, but made the error of going to sleep rather than sitting up in watch, fearing that our presence might frighten the mews away. We realized our mistake when we awoke the next morning to find the thin wooden bars of the cage chewed clean through. Tom swore colourfully in the several languages we had acquired in our journeys and built a new cage. With the mews forewarned, it took us several more nights before we met with success again, but at last we had a mew—and, having seen the fate of the first cage, we made certain to incarcerate our new captive in a much sturdier prison.

Honeyseekers and desert drakes were the only dragons I had kept in captivity before then. In size the mew more closely resembled the former breed, but whereas a honeyseeker is relatively mild unless provoked (whereupon it will spit toxic saliva at the source of its annoyance), a mew is much less cooperative. Watching it pace the bound aries of its new cage, gnawing speculatively at the joins, I said to Tom, “It does remind me just a little of a cat, beyond the coincidence of its call. Andrew once caged a stray he found in the village, and it behaved much the same way.”

“It’s a pity the Nying can’t set them after rats and shrews. It would do wonders for the grain situation here.”

Much to the bemusement of not only the Nying but also our companions, Tom and I did make some efforts to see whether the mew could be trained. Suhail was a great deal of help in this, although he found the entire enterprise hilarious. During his fosterage among the Aritat nomads, his “desert father” Abu Azali had taught him the noble art of falconry, which Suhail had continued to practice after we purchased the estate of Casselthwaite in Linshire. He was able to show us how to fashion jesses and a hood, and then teach our captive mew to fly to a glove. He did this by placing tidbits of food on the glove and whistling in a particular manner, so that the dragon would come to associate him, the glove, and the sound with reward. This stage of the process went well enough, but Suhail was less than convinced. Watching the mew, he said, “I think it’s cleverer than most falcons—too clever, even. You can almost certainly teach it to fly to a lure… but the first time you set it loose in the open air, it will be gone.” He pondered for a time, then said, “I wonder if they would imprint, as an eyass does. Raising a bird from the shell requires a great deal of effort, and I cannot imagine that a mew would be any easier; but it does offer the best results.”

We did not want to risk losing our mew by setting it after a lure, as capturing a replacement would be more trouble than it was worth. It therefore reigned alone in the shed we built for it—“the mews,” as Suhail insisted on calling the structure, grinning every time he did so. (This is of course the proper name for the place where trained falcons are kept… but the pun entertained him far too much.)

Tom did contemplate a second capture, though not for the purpose of training. “It would be interesting to see if they exhibit developmental lability, too. We’ve got evidence of that in a few breeds now, but we’ll need more before we can say for certain that it’s a broad characteristic.”

His phrasing was conservative. In truth, he and I had begun to formulate a theory which did away with the six criteria Sir Richard Edgeworth had used to distinguish “true dragons” from mere “draconic cousins,” and put in their place only one: developmental lability. We did not yet have a good understanding of how the different breeds related to one another—indeed, this is a question that continues to vex dragon naturalists to this day—but we had long since begun to suspect that what ever the answer was, lability played a large role in the diversity we see today. As it is not a characteristic anyone has documented outside the draconic family, it might serve as an admirably simple means of differentiating that family from unrelated creatures.

I would dearly have liked to try breeding mews, or at least conduct experiments with their eggs. After my conversation with Suhail in Falchester, a part of my mind was constantly examining my research, asking at every turn, and what else? It was a peculiar feeling. On the one hand, I lamented the loss of my girlish glee, the sense that it was enough simply to see a new thing and record it for other people to learn. On the other hand, it was also exhilarating, for I was challenging myself to look further, to think harder, to fit what I saw into a larger picture and then tease out its implications.

Unfortunately for our mew-related aspirations, we were again there in the wrong season. Unlike honeyseekers, who will mate at any time of year, mews did so only toward the tail end of winter, with their eggs hatching in mid-spring—“And if we are still here then, something will have gone terribly wrong,” Tom said.

“Can’t you trap a pair and try to carry them out?” Chendley said, when he heard this.

It was a mark of how restless our lieutenant had become that he showed any enthusiasm for the prospect. Even granting that we would carry a smaller quantity of supplies out of the mountains

than we had carried in, adding a pair of caged mews to the pile would not make things any easier. But it was a moot point regardless. “If they’re anything like yaks,” Tom said with a wry

grin, “ they’ll go toes-up from heat exhaustion at the searing temperature of fifteen degrees. But who knows. If all else fails, I’ll have a shot at it.”

One thing Tom and I did not attempt: bone preservation. We had not brought any of the necessary chemicals with us, as Thu’s report had made it clear that we should not expect any bones to survive in one of his mystery specimens. Besides, the process had gone from a matter of great industrial import to a minor curiosity, of interest as a footnote in the history of dragonbone synthesis, but other wise of use only to individuals like ourselves, who wished to study the skeletons of dragons at leisure. We did dissect several mews, working from carcasses provided by the spinsters who hunted them, and confirmed that their bones disintegrated according to the common habit of their kind; but for records we were dependent upon my drawings.

One other activity kept us occupied during the monsoon, and that was mountain climbing. Once Suhail had enough fluency in Tser-zhag to handle minor daily matters, Chendley went out on a regular basis with either him or Thu to hone their skills on the nearby ridges and peaks. Tom and I went less frequently, but the weeks we spent with the herdsmen involved a great deal of clambering around by routes that made the Nying laugh at us. It was preparation for what was to come: the snows would have made our route much more treacherous, and the five of us could not afford the suspicion and lack of coordination that had weakened us on the journey to Hlamtse Rong. By the time the monsoon ended, we were in the best fighting trim of our lives, and ready—we thought—for anything.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2017/04/05/excerpts-marie-brennan-within-the-sanctuary-of-wings/feed/5How Your Role-Playing Game Campaign Can Inspire Your Novelhttps://www.tor.com/2016/10/18/how-your-role-playing-game-campaign-can-inspire-your-novel/
https://www.tor.com/2016/10/18/how-your-role-playing-game-campaign-can-inspire-your-novel/#commentsTue, 18 Oct 2016 16:00:01 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=230953I’m sometimes startled to realize how many of the stories I’ve written have their roots in a role-playing game. They’re by far the minority among my published works, but even so: depending on how you count it, one novel series, one novella series, a novelette, and three short stories have been shaped in some fashion […]]]>

I’m sometimes startled to realize how many of the stories I’ve written have their roots in a role-playing game. They’re by far the minority among my published works, but even so: depending on how you count it, one novel series, one novella series, a novelette, and three short stories have been shaped in some fashion by my RPG experiences. If you include unpublished works, the list increases by at least two more novel series and another short story.

I say “depending on how you count it” because the nature of that influence varies from work to work. Nothing I’ve written is a direct retelling of a whole game. Some make use of pretty significant elements; one is barely related at all, being an idea that sprang sideways out of my character concept and thereafter had nothing to do with it. The process of adaptation changes based on what bit of the game you’re using as your springboard: a setting, a character, a plot. If you’re minded to adapt your own game experiences in some fashion, it can help to look at it from those angles and figure out what you’re dealing with—so let’s dig into each possibility in turn.

A Disclaimer

Before we get started, though, let me make clear: this post will largely be focused on the craft challenges of such an adaptation. As some of you probably know, there’s another dimension to consider, which is the legal one. An RPG is not a solo endeavor; it involves other players, a GM, game designers, setting writers, and so on, and that means copyright may be involved. This is a complicated issue, and I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to attempt to lay down any clear-cut advice in that regard; if you think you might be treading on such ground, I recommend you consult an IP lawyer for real counsel. But as my own experience shows, I don’t think such considerations automatically mean that RPG material can never be reworked as fiction, as long as you go about it the right way.

“The right way” should also be “the ethical way.” Even if your fellow players don’t have copyright on their contributions to the game, you still have an ethical obligation to respect their creative efforts. There’s a running thread throughout the rest of this essay, which is that whatever the core of your adaptation is, you should do as much as you can to change everything else—to come up with your own ideas, your own backstory, your own cosmology to underpin the world and outward flourishes to relate it to the reader. If you want to keep an element that originated with another player, talk to them first. Don’t just re-use their ideas without permission. Even if it’s legal, it isn’t very nice. And why would you want to risk a friendship over something like that?

With that said, on to the approaches!

Setting

Re-using the setting of a game for later fiction is either the easiest or most difficult form of adaptation, depending on the sense in which you mean it.

The easy road is the one that departs from a setting you made up yourself. The GM who invents a whole world in which to play out a story is proverbial; in fact, some of them already plan to employ that setting for short stories or novels, and are using the game as a way to flesh it out or share their ideas with others. If you’re the one who made up the world, awesome! Rock on with your creative self! Because the ideas are your own, there’s nothing stopping you from using them again elsewhere. I did something along these lines myself once; the world of the short story “A Mask of Flesh” is based on the research I did into Mesoamerican folklore for a Changeling: The Dreaming game. Remove the human side, leaving only the folklore, and I had a ready-made society of monkey-people and jaguar-people and feathered serpents, whose political structure and social customs were entirely my own work.

But what if the ideas aren’t your own? What if you were just a player, and your GM is the one who made up the world? The answer to that is between you, your GM, and your ethics. If the creator is cool with it, you can in theory go ahead and use their setting for stories—but you risk a minefield later. What if you write a novel and it becomes a bestseller? Shouldn’t you, in good conscience, share some of that wealth with them? What if they want to write their own books in that world, after you’ve already staked a public claim? I believe that second scenario is akin to the one Steven Erikson and Ian C. Esslemont found themselves in with the world of Malazan; it was a joint creation from day one, and they agreed to each publish their own series based on their game, in consultation with each other. You may not wind up in so intense of a collaboration, but if you want to use a world one of your friends invented, I highly recommend that you write out and sign an equitable agreement beforehand . . . however you may define “equitable” in those circumstances. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll avoid hard feelings later, but at least it reduces the risk.

When it comes to a setting made up by a company instead of a personal friend of yours, though, you’re scaling a pretty difficult mountain. Unless you’re writing licensed tie-in fiction for Paizo or White Wolf or Chaosium or whoever, that whole “equitable agreement” approach isn’t really an option. And while many elements that may appear in game settings are public domain—nobody owns the copyright on the general idea of vampires or faeries or space marines—the specific versions you see in those settings are not free for the taking. So if you’ve fallen in love with a game setting and really want to write a publishable piece of original fiction that takes place there, you’re going to have to break out the file and get to work on those serial numbers.

Which is, I’ll admit, easier said than done. The elements of a setting are interwoven with each other, and they create the flavor you’ve fallen in love with. You have to break that flavor into its component ingredients, so to speak, and figure out which ones you love the most, then—to run this cooking metaphor into the ground—invent a new dish to use them in. If what you love about Legend of the Five Rings is the moral dilemmas posed by the code of bushido, can you write a historical fantasy set in Japan instead? Or come up with a similar-but-not-identical moral code, and then create a society that follows such a code? If instead you’re really attached to the Spirit Realms, can you keep that part while replacing the human side of things wholesale? If what you love about the setting is the warring factions, each with its own strong personality, can you make a different, non-Japanese-inspired society with a similar political matrix? It will be tempting to carry a lot of details along for the ride, dividing each faction into a group of families and giving each family its own special techniques that —

Resist. Resist. Make yourself come up with something equally cool to take the place of those details. Keep only the ones that you really and truly love the most, the ones that inspire you to tell your own stories, and then set them like jewels in a crown of your own forging. Let the rest stay where it belongs.

But what if you can’t do that? What if you have a story you really want to tell, but it will only work if you use a very specific combination of worldbuilding details that are unmistakably derived from a copyrighted setting?

Then you have to accept that it will remain in the realm of gaming, fanfiction, or licensing. I adore the mythical history of the United States I came up with for my Scion campaign, but it fundamentally doesn’t work unless new gods start out as the heroic, half-mortal children of other gods, and Columbia and Britannia and Marianne are all former Scions of Athena who ascended to full divinity, and the enemies of the gods are creatures called Titans who are more like the elemental planes of whatever concepts they represent but they have Scion-like avatars who can act directly in the world. If all I needed was one of those factors, I could probably find a way to make it stand alone, but with all three? That’s a Scion story, and there’s no use pretending it’s anything else. Unless the owners and creators of Scion hire or encourage me to write a story in their world, I just have to live with my happy memories of the game, and be content with that.

Character

By far the majority of my RPG adaptations have, at their root, been driven by character.

This is probably because almost every instance of me adapting an RPG into fiction has sprung out of the experiences I had as a player, instead of as a GM. In fact, I become much more strongly invested in my RPG characters than I generally do with those in the fiction I write, because my PC is the primary conduit through which I experience and influence the story. I perform their speech and behaviors; I think intensively about the things they want, the things they fear, their backstory and what they prefer to do with their spare time. I get to know my PCs much better than I could possibly know every NPC in a game I’m running, or every character in a story I’m writing. Is it any wonder that they’re so prone to lingering in my brain for years afterward?

The good news is, character-based adaptations can work really well, because your inspiration is often flexible. To be sure, no character is an island: their personality and life history are bound up in the setting they live in and the story you told about them the first time around. But if what you’re interested in keeping is the backstory or the personality or the emotional arc or something else of that sort, you can often transplant that root quite effectively, putting your Pathfinder paladin into some Dune-style space opera or your Changeling eshu into a secondary world. (The same thing is true in reverse: I once played a character who was basically Himura Kenshin as a transgender vampire.)

Here the question you have to ask yourself is, who is this character? Not their whole story, not every little thing that ever happened to them, but their core, the sine qua non of their identity. You can put Sherlock Holmes into the modern United States or Tang China or even make him a medical doctor instead of a detective, and he’ll still feel recognizably like Holmes if he has a mind like Holmes’ and uses it to solve puzzles that baffle everyone else. If Holmes, to you, is defined instead by a violin and a cocaine habit, then give him those things (or period/regional equivalent) and forget about the analytical ability. You’re the only one who can say what’s essential to the character, and what’s optional—and what you need to build around those bits in order to make them work.

But make sure that whatever you build still works in its own right. I have a trunked YA novel that’s inspired by a character I played in a tabletop White Wolf game, a popular teenaged girl who discovers her popularity is due to her being a telepath and unconsciously reading/influencing those around her. There were some other details from the game I really wanted to keep, things about her family history and relationships with the people in her life . . . but I did a really terrible job of coming up with reasons for those things that weren’t the ones we used in the game. (For example, replacing a vampire boyfriend with a guy who wound up immortal by a different, insufficiently-defined path.) The novel’s trunked because it looks like exactly what it is, a resurrected Franken-corpse stitched together out of disparate parts that don’t quite fit together like they need to. Until and unless I can fix that, the book’s going nowhere.

Plot

Oh, plot. You knew this was coming: the big one, the all-encompassing Story that you want to retell, in its full and radiant glory.

I’ll break it to you now: you cannot make that work. Not in its entirety.

Not even if it’s set in a non-copyrighted world and you have the written and notarized permission of everyone who ever ran or played in that game. This isn’t an issue of ethics, not in the first instance; it’s an issue of pragmatics. To put it bluntly, a game directly transcribed into fiction is going to be a bad piece of fiction. Games don’t work like written stories; their pacing is different, their narrative techniques are different, their focus shifts differently when switching between various character and plotlines. Events in games happen because the dice said so. Characters drop out of the plot and then reappear because a player was out of town. People often criticize movie adaptations for altering the story from the novel, but the truth is, that’s necessary; what works in one medium falls flat in another. Whether you’re going from book to movie or movie to book, you have to play to the strengths of your medium, rather than trying to approximate the techniques of the source. The same is true here.

As with any other kind of game adaptation, you have to decide what it is you really care about. When I was writing the novelette “False Colours”, I knew I wouldn’t try to include the entire one-shot LARP it came from; as with any LARP, I was wildly ignorant of half the plotlines (which coincidentally included every plotline where magic was involved), and trying to replace them would only take the narrative attention away from the story I really wanted to retell. My goal was to recreate the serendipitous moment where, just when my allies were secretly formulating a plot to help me escape my problems by faking my death, I accidentally got shot by my own captain. If the LARP was a tapestry, that was a single thread pulled from the fabric. Then, having pulled it, I ditched everything involving magic and espionage and mummies rising from the dead, and set about weaving an entirely new cloth around that thread.

This approach poses the biggest ethical complications, when it comes to respecting the contributions of other people. You can make up a setting or thoroughly revamp an existing one and do just fine, and a character exists so much in your own head that, while other PCs and NPCs may have had an influence on them, you can still consider what you’re working with to be your own creation. But plot? Plot is a collaborative thing. It’s exceedingly difficult to use it in any great detail without bringing in the actions—which is to say, the creative efforts—of your GM and fellow players.

The further you let yourself stray from the source, the easier a time you’ll have of it. I say that “Love, Cayce” is inspired by a game I played in, but the inspiration consists of “the children of a bunch of adventurers grow up to be adventurers themselves and then write letters home about the crazy things they’ve been doing.” The plot-based resemblances more or less end at the first line: “Dear Mom and Dad, the good news is, nobody’s dead anymore.” But when I wrote “False Colours,” it wasn’t just about my cross-dressing naval lieutenant; it was also about her best friend and her love interest and her captain and our GM, the backstory we’d all invented together and the actions we took during the game. I went to greater lengths with that story to obtain permission from my fellow players than I did with any other adaptation I’ve attempted to date, and I won’t be surprised if it continues to hold that record for the rest of my career.

A Closing Exhortation

The common theme throughout this post has been “figure out what you need to keep, and then change everything else.” Which leaves one final step: be willing to change the essentials, too.

I’m not saying you have to. After all, there was some bright spark that made you want to write this story; I’m not going to tell you to extinguish it. But you may very well find, as you’re working on your draft, that even those bits you thought were essential aren’t quite. The new ideas you came up with have developed their own momentum, leading you in directions that aren’t the one you originally planned for. Be willing to go with that momentum—the same way you would if the plot of a game you were playing in took an unexpected turn. Gustav Mahler defined tradition as “the preservation of fire, not the worship of ashes,” and the same concept applies here. Don’t ossify the original game material; let it grow and change to fit the rest of what you’ve built around it.

And have fun. There’s a special pleasure in reworking an idea, like a musician remixing an older song; if all goes well, then in the end you have two great songs to listen to.

Marie Brennan is the author of multiple series, including the Memoirs of Lady Trent, the Onyx Court, the Wilders, and the Doppelganger duology, as well as more than forty short stories. Her novella Cold-Forged Flame is now available from Tor.com Publishing. More information can be found at her website.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2016/10/18/how-your-role-playing-game-campaign-can-inspire-your-novel/feed/4Adapting Stories from Games: Writing Cold-Forged Flamehttps://www.tor.com/2016/09/14/adapting-stories-from-games-writing-cold-forged-flame/
https://www.tor.com/2016/09/14/adapting-stories-from-games-writing-cold-forged-flame/#commentsWed, 14 Sep 2016 18:00:22 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=227439I may as well admit it up front: the protagonist of Cold-Forged Flame is based on a character I played for about four years in an RPG. This isn’t the first time I’ve done something like that, either. My Onyx Court series of novels grew out of a tabletop game I ran back in 2006; […]]]>

I may as well admit it up front: the protagonist of Cold-Forged Flame is based on a character I played for about four years in an RPG.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done something like that, either. My Onyx Court series of novels grew out of a tabletop game I ran back in 2006; my novelette “False Colours” had its genesis in an incident that took place during a one-shot LARP. (I also have story ideas that don’t arise from games, I swear.) One common piece of writing advice holds that games don’t make for good fiction… so why do I keep doing this?

Before I can answer the “why,” I have to answer the “how.” Since the beginning of this year I’ve been blogging at Book View Café about RPGs as a form of storytelling, and one of the points I keep returning to is how RPG narratives aren’t the same as those you find in fiction, for a whole host of reasons. Their pacing and focus is different; they’re mediated by systematic randomness; there’s no single person in control of the entire thing; I could keep going. Beginning writers get cautioned not to try and write stories based on games because it’s a lot like writing up one of your dreams: it sounds awesome to you because you were there and involved, but to an outsider it tends to sound like a disjointed, badly-shaped mass of events that don’t cohere like a proper piece of fiction.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t get good ideas out of games. It just means you have to understand and accept that you can’t adapt the whole thing. You have to dig into that experience and find the core of it, the little shining seed that’s driving you to revisit that story. Find that seed—and then pull it out, and leave the rest behind.

That’s easier said than done. Games can be great fun, with moments of wonderful character drama or pithy dialogue or other bits of awesomeness you really want to keep. But quite apart from the issues bound up in using the contributions of other players (which would be a whole separate post), you have to free yourself to see that core idea on its own terms, and to alter it in a way that suits the new medium. It’s like adapting a novel for the screen: if you don’t accept that a movie doesn’t work the same way as text on a page, you’re going to wind up with a bad movie. You have to think about what effect you’re trying to achieve, and then identify the bits that are necessary to make that happen. Everything else is optional at best.

What does that look like in practice? Well, Cold-Forged Flame makes a good example, because I know what my own starting points were, so let’s use that. (Minor worldbuilding spoilers for the novella will follow, but I don’t think they’ll ruin anybody’s enjoyment of the story.)

The game this comes from is Changeling: The Dreaming, which is an urban fantasy setup wherein faeries protect themselves against the disbelief and banality of the mortal world by sharing the bodies of a succession of human hosts. My seed in this case was my character: a faerie woman whose emotional/psychological/metaphysical arc over the course of the game held enough narrative potential that all it took to make me want to revisit her story was a chance encounter with a song that sounded like it ought to be her anthem. (“I Will Not Bow” by Breaking Benjamin, for those who are curious.) So my goal, in this novella and its sequels, is to recreate that arc—not in its details, but in its general shape and feel.

What was necessary to do that? Two things, at a minimum. First, I needed her to reincarnate, because her arc depends heavily on the fact that each lifetime tends to replicate a certain pattern. As a corollary to that, I needed her not to remember those previous lives in detail, not without a lot of effort. And second, I needed her spirit to exhibit some kind of inherent duality. In Changeling this is expressed through each faerie having Seelie and Unseelie aspects; in the story I’ve reworked that to a different paradigm.

What wasn’t necessary? Basically everything else. Having a supernatural soul incarnating into a mortal host is a very Changeling-specific idea: dump that. Jettison the urban fantasy aspect, too; make it a secondary world instead. (But they’ll need at least a printing-press level of technology, because of certain details of the character.) Get rid of Courts in the political sense and Banality and the Dreaming itself, and the idea that my protagonist and creatures like her feed on creativity and emotion. Chuck every last bit of that, and then ask yourself: okay, how can I create a setup where entities with an inherent spiritual duality live multiple lifetimes among ordinary humans?

I won’t answer that in detail here, because I don’t want to spoil too much. Suffice it to say that I found a way. And then, with that foundation in place, I went through the character’s game history and picked out the moments that really mattered, the places where she learned a new thing about herself or changed or failed at something important. Those formed the skeleton of the story I’m telling now—again, not in their original form, because that would drag in too much associated baggage. Instead I looked for new ways to create that same impact, or at least a similar one. Nothing from the game is sacred. Everything is subject to change … even the core idea I started out with. If I get halfway through this project and find that I kind of want to take it in a different direction, then I’m going to follow that impulse, because this isn’t the story I told before. It’s a new tale, a flame lit from the embers of the old one.

And that brings us back to the question of why. I stopped playing this character ten years ago, but those embers haven’t burned out yet. The idea still has the power to move me, even after all this time. Anything with that much resilience is worth taking another look at, whether it’s a game or a trunked novel or an idea I never got around to writing.

After all, this character has lived multiple lifetimes, each one a variant on the same theme. There’s no reason the same shouldn’t be true of her story.

Marie Brennan is the author of multiple series, including the Memoirs of Lady Trent, the Onyx Court, the Wilders, and the Doppelganger duology, as well as more than forty short stories. Her novella Cold-Forged Flame is now available from Tor.com Publishing. More information can be found at her website.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2016/09/14/adapting-stories-from-games-writing-cold-forged-flame/feed/4Cold-Forged Flamehttps://www.tor.com/2016/09/12/excerpts-cold-forged-flame-marie-brennan/
https://www.tor.com/2016/09/12/excerpts-cold-forged-flame-marie-brennan/#commentsMon, 12 Sep 2016 16:00:23 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=227177The story of a woman’s struggle against her very existence, an epic tale of the adventure and emotional upheaval on the way to face an ancient enigmatic foe. ]]>

The sound of the horn pierces the apeiron, shattering the stillness of that realm. Its clarion call creates ripples, substance, something more. It is a summons, a command. There is will. There is need. And so, in reply, there is a woman.

At the beginning—no, at the end—she appears, full of fury and bound by chains of prophecy. Setting off on an unexplained quest which she is compelled to complete, facing unnatural challenges in a land that doesn’t seem to exist, she will discover the secrets of herself, or die trying. But along the way, the obstacles will grow to a seemingly insurmountable point, and the final choice will be the biggest sacrifice yet.

This is the story of a woman’s struggle against her very existence, an epic tale of the adventure and emotional upheaval on the way to face an ancient enigmatic foe. Marie Brennan’sCold-Forged Flame begins a new series about the consequences of war—and of fate. Available September 13th from Tor.com Publishing.

She comes into existence atop a flat, rough slab of stone. In the first few instants, as the sound of the horn fades, that stone consumes all her attention: its pitted, weathered surface, shedding grit against her knuckles where her fist is braced. It is ancient, that stone, and full of memory.

As she herself is not.

She lifts her head to find she is not alone. Nine people stand in a loose arc in front of where she kneels, six men, three women, with torches all around throwing their features into shifting, untrustworthy relief. Pale, all of them, much paler than her. The torchlight lends their skin a false warmth, brightens their hair to gold or fire’s orange. Every last one of them, she thinks, is holding their breath. Watching her.

On the ground before her lies the corpse of a bull, its throat neatly slit. Some of the blood fills a copper bowl set at the foot of the stone, while the rest soaks quietly into the grass. At the sight of it, her muscles tense abruptly, as if lightning has shot through her veins.

They’re still watching her. They carry knives, the men and women alike, and when her free hand moves, the one not set against the stone, it finds nothing at her own side. There should be a weapon, but there isn’t. Which means these people have the advantage.

It isn’t a good way to start.

She licks her lips, finds everything moves as it should. Tests her voice.

“Who the hell are you?”

The words come out like a whip-crack, breaking the quiet of the night. The man at the center of the arc straightens. He grips a curved horn in one hand, a bloodstained knife in the other; he is the one who sounded the call, the one who slit the bull’s throat. Drawing in a deep breath, he gives the horn to the woman at his side and steps forward. He is older than the others, his hair and beard grey beneath the fire’s false color, and the pin that holds his draped garment at his shoulder is richly worked gold. A leader of some kind. She focuses on him, almost as intensely as she had upon the stone.

In the tone of one speaking with ritual intent, he says, “I am Ectain cul Simnann, Cruais of my people, and I bind you to this task: to bring us blood from the cauldron of the Lhian.”

The weight of it has been there all this time, lost beneath the sights and sounds, the scent of blood in the air. At his declaration, she feels that weight solidify around her, binding with a strength beyond any rope or chain. She is caught: has been since the first instant, with no hope of escape.

The fury of it drives her from her stillness. In one fluid motion, she rises from her crouch and leaps over the copper bowl of blood, the cooling body of the bull, to land in front of the leader. He has a knife and she doesn’t, but it doesn’t matter: at first because she’s determined to kill him anyway, and then because she can’t. Her hand slams to a halt before she can touch him.

It doesn’t stop him from lurching backward. His eyes are wide with fear, but not surprise. So. He knew she couldn’t hurt him… but his confidence in that protection was less than absolute.

Her lips skin back in a fierce smile. “You’re safe. How about the rest of them?”

“Please!” He drops to his knees, hands raised in a gesture of peace. Then he notices the bloody knife he still clutches, and lays it down hastily. “Please. We mean you no harm. We only need you to do something for us. When that’s done, you will be free to go, with our blessings and our thanks—you have my word.”

What good is his word, when he’s a stranger to her? Ectain cul Simnann, Cruais of his people: sounds with no meaning. She knows blood; she knows knives. She doesn’t know him.

She casts a cold stare across the others. They’ve clumped together for comfort and safety, backing up toward one of the tall stones that ring this place. None of them have laid down their knives. They won’t attack her, though: they need her for something. To bring them blood from the cauldron of the Lhian—whoever or whatever that might be. So they’ll be hesitant if she goes for them. She felt the easy response of her body when she leapt from the stone, how readily her muscles answered her call. She’s pretty sure she could kill one, two—maybe even three—before they subdue her.

Part of her wants to do it, just for what they’ve done. Binding her to their will.

It won’t accomplish anything, of course. That’s the meaning of the lead weighing down her bones: sooner or later, she will have to do as this man commands, whether she kills everyone he brought with him or not. The only thing murder would accomplish would be turn him against her—assuming he actually means what he said, about letting her go afterward. But there’s a significant part of her that wants to say fuck it and kill them anyway.

“Please,” the Cruais whispers. It draws her attention back to him, which is probably what he intended. He’s arranged himself more formally now, with his hands curled into fists and set against the ground. “I could bind you not to harm them. But I don’t want to. All I want is for you to bring us the blood.”

What tugs at her now isn’t the binding. It’s curiosity. “Why do you need it? What’s so special about this blood?”

He shakes his head. “It’s better if I don’t tell you.”

Her breath huffs out in disbelief. “Right. Then let’s try something else. Who, or what, is the Lhian? Where can I find this cauldron?”

A dead leaf clings to his knuckle when he lifts one hand to gesture at a young man watching from nearby. She can see a family resemblance in the wide-set eyes, the rounded cheeks that have fallen into jowls on the Cruais. “Therdiad will take you, as far as he can go.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“Forgive me.” He sets his fist back down, bows forward until his head nearly touches the ground. She can see his arms shaking as he bends: from age or nerves, or maybe both. “I understand your frustration—”

“I don’t think you do.” She drops to one knee and seizes the collar of his tunic. It’s partly a test: yes, she can touch him, so long as she doesn’t plan on inflicting bodily harm. But maybe he doesn’t know that, because a small sound of fear escapes him when her hand closes around the fabric and jerks him up from his bow.

In a low voice, iron-hard with anger, she says, “I have nothing. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know where this place is, what is going on, or why the fuck you need me to do this for you, apart from guessing that you’re a coward too scared to do it for himself. All I know is that apparently I have no choice: I have to do what you say. The least you owe me in return is some information.”

He sags in her grip, not fighting. “I do this for the good of my people.”

“Your people don’t mean a damned thing to me.”

“I know. And you have no reason to believe me. When you return, I promise I will answer your questions—all of them, as completely as I can. You are right, that I owe you that. But for now…” His mouth trembles, then steadies. “I do this for your own good as well. The less you know, the safer you will be.”

A snarl builds in her throat. She asks questions, and he gives her only a paradox in return. If what he says is true, there must be a reason. But if what he says is true, then he can’t tell her that reason—not without defeating his own purpose. Which means she’s supposed to trust him.

Every instinct rebels at that thought. He’s a stranger—no, worse. He’s the man holding her leash. There’s no basis in that for trust. And she has nothing to draw on for strength or reassurance, because inside her there’s a gaping void, an abyss where everything should be: memory, understanding, knowledge. Her sense of self. She might as well be dying of thirst in the desert, and he’s holding a skin of water, warning her that it’s poisoned.

How the hell do I even know what a desert is?

That question loosens her grip. The Cruais scrambles out of range, standing once more. He reaches below the collar of his tunic and draws out a vial on a cord, which he offers to her with an unsteady hand. But when he speaks, his voice is stronger. “Please. I swear to you on my sister’s heart that I will give you everything when you return. An explanation. Your freedom. Any gifts of gold or supply that we can give you. But you must go.”

When he says that, the hook buried in her spirit tugs in response. Yes: she has to go. But she also has to come back.

He doesn’t flinch when she snatches the vial from his hand, like a cat taking its prey. When she fixes her gaze on him, though, he shivers. She takes black satisfaction in that. “If you don’t make good on your promise,” she says, “then I swear on my own blood: you will pay for it.”

The lightning in her body sparks in response.

* * *

Therdiad takes her: the Cruais’ grandson, she thinks. He’s dressed much like the old man, although the pin on his shoulder is less elegantly worked. She doesn’t ask. What does it matter, who takes her on this journey? She’s just as fucked regardless.

The torchlight fades behind them, but she can still see it for a long distance in this flat, grassy terrain. The sky above them is clear and brilliant with stars, no moon to outshine them. She doesn’t feel much like talking to Therdiad: they walk in silence, while the stars move slowly overhead.

She loses track of how long they’re out there, settling into the comfortable rhythm of walking. It comes as an unwelcome surprise when she hears a steady, rushing pulse up ahead, breaking the quiet. Water. Waves. The sea, she thinks. The word brings an image to mind, though she can’t remember ever having seen it.

There are more lights, too, a dim glow off to the left. “Is that a town?” she asks.

Therdiad casts a glance that way, then promptly veers right. Away from the lights. “That isn’t where we’re going.”

“How am I to know?” she says dryly, following. “It isn’t like you’ve given me a map.”

“It won’t be much further,” Therdiad says. “We’re looking for a rowboat.”

“Your rowboat? Or will any rowboat do? I wonder… could be that’s your home back there, and you don’t want me to see it. Or could be you’re on somebody else’s land here, and you’re afraid of getting caught.” His shoulders twitch at the second suggestion, and she grins at his back, feral. “I see. So we’re stealing a rowboat from the good people of that place.”

Therdiad pauses long enough to give her what she suspects is his best glare. It doesn’t leave much of a mark. “I’m not a thief. The boat is ours. We left it there last night, before we went to the ring of stones.”

Nine people wouldn’t fit in any boat Therdiad could row on his own. Carrying a boat overland would be inconvenient; that suggests they came by water, and there’s a second boat somewhere, which brought the rest of the group here. She calculates this reflexively, even though it doesn’t lead her anywhere useful: if she wants to escape, it would be easier to wait until Therdiad finds the boat, then club him over the head and take the boat for her own. Or just run for that town. She might get at least a little distance away, before the hook buried in her gut drags her back to her path.

Running would be a waste of time, and not one she feels like indulging in. But she still thinks about these things, as if it’s habit.

They find the boat pulled up above the tide line in a small inlet, where the tiny slope gives it all the cover to be had in this flat terrain. It’s a narrow sliver, wooden-ribbed, covered in cured hide. Much too small for nine people; four would be cramped. She wonders where the other boat is.

Therdiad puts his hand on the edge and says, “Help me?” for all the world as if they’re working together. She snorts and takes the other side.

At least he doesn’t ask her to row. He arranges the oars and gets them out past the breakers with the skill of someone who’s done this a lot, then settles into a comfortable rhythm, like she did on the walk here. “I hope your strength holds out,” she says, “because I don’t remember the last time I rowed.”

The sarcasm misses him completely. “It isn’t far,” he says. “The island is in the middle of the bay.”

So it’s a bay they’re in, not the open sea. Probably too wide for her to swim, though—especially since she has no idea whether she knows how to swim.

A thin mist rises as he rows. She can see the moon just above the horizon now, a sharp crescent. Waning, she thinks—which means it isn’t long until dawn. Another thing she knows, as if she’s been awake on countless nights she can’t recall.

“Thank you,” Therdiad says without warning.

She can’t help raising an eyebrow. “For….”

“Doing this. It’s very—”

He stops, and she regards him with an ironic eye. “Brave of me?”

Therdiad ducks his chin. “I was going to say kind.”

But it isn’t, and they both know it. There can be no kindness without choice. No courage, either. She hasn’t even been kind in how she’s dealt with the situation.

It says something about Therdiad, though, that he wanted to thank her anyway.

He continues rowing. There’s nothing to see but the dark, low waves, and the two of them in the boat. She put the vial around her neck when they started walking; now she lifts it and examines it in the faint light of the moon. The shaft, she thinks, is made of bone, hollowed out. Human or animal? She can’t tell. The stopper is more bone, carved to fit tightly, with a hole in the top where the leather cord is threaded through. The entire thing is barely the size of her finger; it won’t hold much blood. Whatever they need it for, they don’t need a lot.

She tucks the vial away inside the neck of her shirt and looks around for something else to occupy herself. Her gaze falls on a pistol laid on the bench at Therdiad’s side.

He catches her looking. He stiffens and the rhythm of his rowing falters, as if he’s fighting the urge to drop his oars and move the gun out of her reach.

He doesn’t look reassured. After the threats she made to the Cruais, it’s no surprise.

She shrugs and leans back, bracing her hands against the stern of the boat and stretching her legs out, as if at leisure. “You’re taking me where I have to go, aren’t you? I shoot you, I just end up having to row myself there. Not worth the trouble.”

“Very comforting,” he mutters, but a hint of a grin tightens the corner of his mouth. His rowing gets stronger again.

After a few more strokes, she lets herself study the gun again, openly this time. “I’m just wondering how I recognize that thing. I know it’s a pistol; I know you hold one end and point the other at somebody you want to kill, and then you pull the trigger to lower the match and a bullet comes out at high speed—though I’d have to light the match first. I’m pretty sure I could load it if I tried.” That isn’t what her hands itch for, though. She isn’t sure what is. “I even think I know that what you have there is an antique—there are better guns out there than matchlocks. How can I know all that, when I don’t remember anything from before I opened my eyes on that slab?”

Therdiad doesn’t answer. But from the way he bends his effort to the task of rowing, she knows he has answers, and is holding them back. The Cruais should have sent someone else. Someone more ignorant, or a better liar.

She asks, voice flat, “Did I even exist before that moment?”

“No,” Therdiad says. Then: “Yes.”

He drops the oars. They rattle in their locks, heavy and wet, but there’s a collar that will keep them from sliding all the way out and being lost in the waves. She’s paying attention to that, but he isn’t, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped tight.

“Don’t,” he says, full of intensity. “Don’t try to remember. You can if you try—maybe—but it really is better for you if you don’t.”

“Why?” She resists the urge to grab him by the shoulders. That won’t work this time; it will only make him stop talking. “Is there something dangerous in my memories?”

He shakes his head. “It isn’t that. I mean, maybe—I don’t know what you would remember. But that isn’t why I’m warning you. The more you remember… the more you might end up losing.”

It puts a core of ice in her gut. She wants to ask him to explain, but he’s already pulling back, regretting having said that much. Even so—”How the ever-loving hell do your people expect me to succeed at this, if I’m supposed to go through it blind?”

“You’ll succeed.” He picks up the oars again, resumes rowing. “That’s why we brought you here.”

]]>https://www.tor.com/2016/09/12/excerpts-cold-forged-flame-marie-brennan/feed/1Learning to See Through Photographyhttps://www.tor.com/2016/04/06/learning-to-see-through-photography/
https://www.tor.com/2016/04/06/learning-to-see-through-photography/#commentsWed, 06 Apr 2016 18:00:04 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=210187In this ongoing series, we ask SF/F authors to describe a specialty in their lives that has nothing (or very little) to do with writing. Join us as we discover what draws authors to their various hobbies, how they fit into their daily lives, and how and they inform the author’s literary identity!

When I was a kid, I used to think I didn’t like photography very much.

Then I went to Costa Rica, and realized that I just hadn’t spent much time in places worth photographing.

I still have the shots I took there. Most of them aren’t very good; when your previous photographic endeavors mostly involved tapping your camp friends on the shoulder and then snapping a surprise picture of them when they turned around, you don’t have much in the way of skill. But the sheer photogenic nature of some of the places I went came through despite my ignorance.

It was enough to encourage me. Over the next ten years or so, I began to pay attention to things like framing and composition, improving my photography through the basic decisions of where to stand and how much to zoom. The advent of digital cameras gave me the ability to see right away whether my shot had come out well, and the freedom to take a larger number of pictures meant I was more willing to just keep hitting the shutter button; my percentage of good images wasn’t any higher (in fact, it was probably lower), but sheer numbers meant I was getting more that were worthwhile. Slowly, bit by bit, my pictures got better.

But framing and composition can only get you so far… which is where my parents come in.

I always thought parents were supposed to steer their children away from drugs. Mine? Are a pair of pushers—my father especially. Years ago my brother and I bought my mother a photography course as a present; my father went along, and next thing you know, they’re both shutterbugs. Ever since then, they’ve been not-so-subtly encouraging my visual ambitions. In 2011, after I’d made enough noises about wanting a more advanced camera than your standard point-and-shoot, they gave me my mother’s old camera, a Leica V-Lux 2. It wasn’t quite a system camera—the sort where you change out lenses—but it offered me a lot more control over how I took the pictures. If you’ve ever paid attention to photography, you’ll have heard various arcane terms like “f-stop” and “ISO;” well, I finally knew what they meant, and how to employ them. Suddenly I could get pictures like this one:

Because at last I knew how to make my camera create a shallow depth of field, rather than relying on it to guess that I was trying to achieve that kind of effect. I could compensate for dim lighting, rather than winding up with grainy, horrible messes. I could keep bright shots from being blown out. Hooray!

But controlling the camera’s settings can only get you so far… which is where Lightroom comes in.

Despite having a growing interest in photography, I’d resisted doing any kind of editing on my digital pictures. I didn’t want to “photoshop” them, I insisted—I meant the term as a pejorative—and editing sounded like an awful lot of work, anyway. Despite the Drug Pusher Extraordinaire constantly encouraging me, I refused to do anything more than drop the images onto my computer and call it a day.

Until a year and a half after the Japan trip. My husband and I had been to Poland; I gave my father a thumb drive with a few of my shots and said, “Okay. Show me what Lightroom can do.”

Two minutes later I was hanging off his sleeve, begging for Lightroom as a Christmas present.

See, up until that point, I’d only understood about half of photography—the half that takes place before you press the shutter button. The process doesn’t end there, though; it never has. Back when we all took our pictures on film, there was this thing called “development,” and a skilled developer could do all kinds of things with the raw negative: crop, straighten, bring up the highlights here and deepen the shadows there, enhance color or mute it, etc. Refusing to edit my photos was a bit like refusing to develop the negatives—or rather, refusing to let anybody do anything more than run them blindly through a standard chemical bath (which is probably what happened at most photo-development places). If I wanted to be a good photographer, I had to start thinking about development.

Mostly I don’t do anything very radical to my pictures. 99 percent of the time, what I’m trying to do is make the image look more like what my eye saw; even when I’m trying my best with the camera settings, things often end up just a little bit “off.” Too dim, too bright, too washed-out. The before-and-after below is a fairly heavy edit for me, but it’ll give you a sense of what I mean about making the picture look like the reality:

I took that image through museum glass with my phone’s camera, which means it didn’t start out very good. Through the magic of Lightroom, however, I was able to save it—to transform it back into something more like itself.

Not that there’s anything wrong with going whole hog on the editing! I wanted a shot of this one floor carving in Okinawa, but the light was such that there was no way for me to get a straight overhead view without casting a major shadow over part of it. After a massive amount of cropping and tilting and futzing with the colors, here’s the before and after:

Or take the case of some of my early print photos. When I went to have them scanned, I discovered that a lot of them had begun to yellow around the edges. Mostly I didn’t care, because they weren’t good shots to begin with, but in the few cases where the composition was worth it, I dropped a sepia filter over the whole thing and then fuzzed the edges out to black, making them look very old-fashioned (and coincidentally hiding the yellow).

But development can only get you so far … which is where a better camera comes in.

This is almost where my story ends. I did upgrade the V-Lux 2 to a V-Lux Typ 114, a newer model from the same line; it is vastly superior to its outdated cousin (which, remember, was a hand-me-down when I got it). I’ve resisted getting a system camera, though, despite knowing that having a wide-angle lens and a telephoto and so forth would advance my skills yet again. Quite frankly, I don’t want to carry that much weight around with me when I’m traveling. Plus, my husband is already remarkably patient with the amount of time I spend adjusting camera settings, taking the same shot three or four times because it still hasn’t come out quite right. I don’t want to ask him to wait even longer while I change out lenses.

Still, that doesn’t mean my photography can’t still improve. In many ways, I’ve gone back to the basics: framing and composition. You see, over the years, photography has changed the way I see.

Take this picture, for example:

That’s from Notre Dame in Paris. Had I gone there before I got serious about my photography, I would have been impressed; I would have taken pictures of the nave and the monuments and other such obvious things. But I wouldn’t have stopped to look at the round metal stands that hold dozens of tiny votive candles, some of them lit, some burned out, with other islands of light floating in the dimness beyond. I might have photographed the great door through which I entered, but I wouldn’t have snapped a close-up shot of the door knocker and the intricate ironwork that covers the boards. I would have admired the stained glass, but not shifted around until I could get a perfect silhouette of a statue in prayer, black against the color behind him.

I see more, now that I’m looking with a photographer’s eye. Details make for good images, so now I actively seek them out. And not just when I’m traveling: I’ll stop on my way home from the post office to pull out my camera and capture the sight of a brilliant autumn leaf in the middle of a freshly-paved sidewalk slab.

I still am much more of a writer than a photographer. But in little more than five years, I’ve gone from learning what an f-stop is to displaying eight of my photographs at Borderlands Books in San Francisco, putting them up for sale for the first time in my life.

I consider myself a photographer now, as well as a writer. I like the way it makes me see.

Marie Brennan is the World Fantasy Award-nominated author of several fantasy series, including the Memoirs of Lady Trent, the Onyx Court, the Wilders series, and the Doppelganger duology, as well as more than forty short stories. More information can be found at her website. To purchase prints of her photographs, contact her at marie.brennan@gmail.com.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2016/04/06/learning-to-see-through-photography/feed/6From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review (A Lady Trent Story)https://www.tor.com/2016/04/05/from-the-editorial-page-of-the-falchester-weekly-review-a-lady-trent-story/
https://www.tor.com/2016/04/05/from-the-editorial-page-of-the-falchester-weekly-review-a-lady-trent-story/#commentsTue, 05 Apr 2016 13:00:16 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=209964After risking the neck of her loved ones and herself during her perilous sea voyage aboard The Basilisk, and the discoveries made at Keonga, Isabella, Lady Trent, returns to Scirland with the aim of publishing her research. And yet, given the level of secret knowledge she now posses, she is reduced to waiting to reveal her new academic discovery until royal decrees can be lifted and a fraught political situation avoided. In her idle frustration, Isabella vents her spleen upon the shoddy research published by lesser men with swollen heads in local journals. Enjoy the following collection of letters, found in a trunk of mislaid scholarly documents left behind when she removed to Linshire for the season.
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After risking the neck of her loved ones and herself during her perilous sea voyage aboard The Basilisk, and the discoveries made at Keonga, Isabella, Lady Trent, returns to Scirland with the aim of publishing her research. And yet, given the level of secret knowledge she now possesses, she is reduced to waiting to reveal her new academic discovery until royal decrees can be lifted and a fraught political situation avoided. In her idle frustration, Isabella vents her spleen upon the shoddy research published by lesser men with swollen heads in local journals. Enjoy the following collection of letters, found in a trunk of mislaid scholarly documents left behind when she removed to Linshire for the season.

Dear Sirs—

I was fascinated by Mr. Benjamin Talbot’s brief notice, published in the 28 Seminis issue of your magazine, detailing his acquisition of a preserved specimen from a heretofore undocumented draconic species. As we all know, legends of the cockatrice date back many centuries, but I am unaware of any reputable examples collected before now, either dead or alive. This is a thrilling event for the field of dragon naturalism, and I heartily encourage Mr. Talbot to publish his discovery at greater length, including details such as the manner of its acquisition, the island or archipelago in the Broken Sea where such beasts may be found, and a thorough description of its anatomy. An engraving to accompany this article would not go amiss—though naturally a public presentation of his find would be even more desirable. I may dare hope that Mr. Talbot is even now preparing such an article for publication, whether in your magazine or elsewhere, for I have awaited further information with bated breath, and fear I will soon turn blue for lack of oxygen.

I am, as always, your devoted reader,

MRS. ISABELLA CAMHERST

***

Dear Sirs—

I will beg your leave to respond to Mrs. Camherst through the medium of your pages, for she has addressed me publicly, and as such deserves a public reply, lest I leave your readers in unnecessary suspense.

I assure Mrs. Camherst that my cockatrice will be made public in due course. I am making arrangements even now for its display, which will begin on 21 Caloris in Murtick Square, with admission quite reasonably priced. I hope that she understands my reticence in saying more about its place of origin; the appetite for such curiosities is insatiable, and were I to make public the name of the island where this specimen was collected, hunters might flock to its shores, and the population would soon be reduced to a fraction of its current number. Mrs. Camherst having expressed tender sentiment for the well-being of dragons on previous occasions, I trust that her feminine heart will understand my concerns, and not begrudge me this measure of caution.

Your obedient servant,

BENJAMIN TALBOT

***

Dear Sirs—

I thank Mr. Talbot for his solicitous attention to the well-being of both cockatrices and my feminine heart, but I had hoped for rather more specific an answer. To explain my position: as some of your readers may know, I recently returned to Scirland following extensive travels around the world, including a lengthy sojourn in the Broken Sea. I do not claim to have visited every island in that region (a feat I am not certain any human can honestly say he has achieved), but my ship called at multiple ports in both the Melatan and Puian regions, and in all these places I made no secret of my interest in creatures of even faintly draconic nature. I studied everything from sea-serpents to fire lizards to the so-called komodo “dragons” of Singkarbau (which proved not to be dragons at all)—but nowhere in my travels did anyone say anything to me of a creature resembling the legendary cockatrice. Given the distance between here and the Broken Sea, and the unsuitability of any part of the cockatrice for use in ladies’ fashion, I cannot imagine that hunters would make terribly large inroads on the population there; but there may be scholars who would wish to study them in their natural habitat, and for such individuals the name of the island would be tremendously useful. Elsewise they must search throughout the Broken Sea for this creature, crossing off their list only those islands I myself visited, where I am certain no cockatrices are to be found.

Regardless, I look forward to Mr. Talbot’s public presentation of his specimen, which I will be very interested to inspect at the earliest possible opportunity.

Yours in intellectual curiosity,

MRS. ISABELLA CAMHERST

***

Dear Sirs—

It was with some dismay that I opened the 29 Floris issue of your magazine to find another letter from Mrs. Camherst gracing its pages. Although her enthusiasm is remarkable, I begin to feel that she is using your publication as a forum for some kind of campaign against me, which might better have been carried out in private correspondence.

I am of course aware of the expedition to the Broken Sea last year, led by my esteemed colleague from the Philosophers’ Colloquium, Mr. Thomas Wilker. I do not think, however, that Mrs. Camherst’s role in that expedition qualifies her to offer an authoritative opinion on the full complement of draconic species in the region—a fact she herself admits, though she does not let this hinder her from offering such an opinion, regardless. Indeed, many of the stories we have of her actions during that expedition are anything but scholarly in nature.

In light of this, I can understand Mrs. Camherst’s enthusiasm for pursuing the origins of my cockatrice. Were she able to persuade anyone to fund her travels, she might return to the Broken Sea and see the creatures for herself. But I regret to say there is an unfortunate air of grasping ambition about her persistence on this topic, as if she wishes to claim the position of authority regarding this species for herself. Perhaps Mrs. Camherst is unaware of the courtesies practiced among gentlemen and scholars, which dissuade us from “poaching” one another’s discoveries; if so, then I hope this reply will make them clear, and bring this matter to a long-overdue close.

Your obedient servant,

BENJAMIN TALBOT, F.P.C.

***

Dear Sirs—

I pray you forgive me the tone of this letter, which, although addressed to you, is in reply to Mr. Talbot, and is crafted for that audience.

I note that Mr. Talbot chose to sign his second reply (printed in the 5 Graminis issue of your magazine) with his credentials as a Fellow of the Philosophers’ Colloquium. Being a lady, I of course have not been admitted to the ranks of that venerable institution—but I like to think that my publications speak for themselves on the question of my scholarly achievements. (I believe the publications that earned Mr. Talbot his fellowship in the Colloquium were on the topic of geology; though of course this does not completely invalidate his observations in the field of dragon naturalism.) As for Mr. Talbot’s comment regarding my actions during the voyage of the Basilisk, I choose to interpret that as a reference to the events in Keonga; for surely a gentleman of Mr. Talbot’s stature would not slander me by alluding to the scurrilous and unfounded rumours which have circulated regarding my private life and interactions with the men around me.

I must, however, correct Mr. Talbot’s misapprehension concerning one of those men. He named Thomas Wilker as the leader of our expedition; you will note my use of the plural pronoun there, which I employ with deliberate precision. The expedition was a joint endeavour between Mr. Wilker and myself, in both its planning and its execution. Any who doubt this matter are invited to submit their doubts to Mr. Wilker himself, who will soon set them straight. (He may even, I dare say, do so politely.)

Furthermore, I should like it to be known that I made several attempts to contact Mr. Talbot by more private means but, having received no reply, found myself with no other option but to address him in the pages of your esteemed publication, in the hopes that I might meet with better luck here. If he wishes to avoid public debate in the future, I suggest he inquire into the reliability of his servants, or perhaps of the Falchester postal service, to discover why it is that my letters have apparently not reached his breakfast table. I am certain there can be no other explanation for why my previous queries went unanswered.

With these matters out of the way, let me speak bluntly.

It seems exceedingly peculiar to me that the cockatrice, which is well-known in Anthiopean legend these past thousand years, should be found on an obscure island in the Broken Sea—quite on the other side of the world. Mr. Talbot has not yet advanced any explanation for how our ancestors of the fifth millennium knew of such a creature, when trade even to the nearer reaches of Eriga or Dajin was uncommon and carried out only with difficulty; nor for why it seems to be unknown in the legends of lands closer to its natural range. Furthermore, while there are branches of the draconic family in which feathers are known—the quetzalcoatl and kukulkan of southern Otholé are of course the most famous, but to them I may add the drakeflies I discovered during my expedition with Mr. Wilker to Bayembe and Mouleen—a cockatrice strikes me as a rather different matter. I know of no true dragon or draconic cousin that exhibits both scales and feathers, and I must say that I find so hybrid a creature unlikely in the extreme.

I do not, of course, accuse Mr. Talbot of deception. Rather let us say that I must, with reluctance, consider the possibility that he himself has been deceived; that the man who provided him with his specimen (a man, I will note, who has not yet been identified to the public) was either a charlatan, or himself the gull of one such. The scholarly community has been subjected to hoaxes before, and no doubt will be again.

That Mr. Talbot should consider my interest in this matter to be tantamount to poaching is not only insulting, but indicative of a dismayingly proprietary attitude toward scientific knowledge. Our wisdom grows not by staking out claims and defending them against all comers, but by sharing information freely, so that we may work together for the betterment of all. I would gladly cede all credit for the discovery and study of the cockatrice to Mr. Talbot, if only I trusted him to proceed with integrity.

Yours in regret,

MRS. ISABELLA CAMHERST

***

Dear Sirs—

I will keep my reply brief, as Mrs. Camherst’s vendetta against me has already occupied too much of your publication and the patience of your readers. I take the gravest exception to her accusations against me, and were this the previous century and she a gentlemen, I would not hesitate to call her out. As it stands, I can see no productive end to this debate; and to further engage her would only be to validate her pretensions to scientific authority. This will be the last that you or your readers will hear from me on the matter.

BENJAMIN TALBOT, F.P.C.

***

Dear Sirs—

I was delighted to read last week’s leading article [“A Cock-and-Trice Story,” 30 Caloris—eds.]. I had followed with interest Mrs. Camherst’s debate with Mr. Talbot in previous issues, and so it was gratifying to see the conclusion of that tale featured in your publication. I only regret that the name of the man who sold the specimen to Mr. Talbot is still unknown, as any fellow who can convincingly graft the head of a parrot onto the body of an immature wyvern must be very skilled at taxidermy, and I should like to put such talents to more reputable ends. But I thank Mrs. Camherst for her indefatigable pursuit of the truth, and commend her dedication in disguising herself to attend the opening of Mr. Talbot’s exhibit, despite his very public opposition to her presence. While I am certain that a lady scholar of her stature has no need of financial assistance, I am taking up a collection to reimburse her for the costs incurred by admission to the exhibit and her subsequent arrest, as a measure of public gratitude. Any who wish to contribute may write to me at No. 14 Harwater Street in Falchester.

Your servant,

WILLIAM PENBURGH

]]>https://www.tor.com/2016/04/05/from-the-editorial-page-of-the-falchester-weekly-review-a-lady-trent-story/feed/5In the Labyrinth of Drakeshttps://www.tor.com/2016/03/22/excerpts-in-the-labyrinth-of-drakes-marie-brennan/
https://www.tor.com/2016/03/22/excerpts-in-the-labyrinth-of-drakes-marie-brennan/#commentsTue, 22 Mar 2016 18:00:05 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=208549Book 4 of the Memoirs of Lady Trent. Isabella's naturalist expedition to the inhospitable deserts of Akhia--and the chance action of a dragon--set the stage for her greatest achievement yet.]]>

Even those who take no interest in the field of dragon naturalism have heard of Lady Trent’s expedition to the inhospitable deserts of Akhia. Her discoveries there are the stuff of romantic legend, catapulting her from scholarly obscurity to worldwide fame. The details of her personal life during that time are hardly less private, having provided fodder for gossips in several countries.

As is so often the case in the career of this illustrious woman, the public story is far from complete. In this, the fourth volume of her memoirs, Lady Trent relates how she acquired her position with the Royal Scirling Army; how foreign saboteurs imperiled both her work and her well-being; and how her determined pursuit of knowledge took her into the deepest reaches of the Labyrinth of Drakes, where the chance action of a dragon set the stage for her greatest achievement yet.

In the Labyrinth of Drakes is the fourth installment in the acclaimed Lady Trent fantasy series from Marie Brennan, available April 5th from Tor Books!

One

There is very little pleasure in being snubbed over a task for which one is well qualified. There is, however, quite a bit of pleasure in watching the ones who did the snubbing later eat their own words.

Credit for this pleasure must go to Thomas Wilker, who had for many years been my colleague in matters scientific. He was a Fellow of the Philosophers’ Colloquium, as I was not—that august body having condescended to admit into their ranks the occasional man of less than gentle birth, but no ladies regardless of their ancestry. Strictly speaking, it was Tom and not I who received the snubbing.

The post refused to him was the focus of stiff competition. Natural history as a scholarly field was not so terribly old; the more specialized topic of dragon naturalism had only recently begun to emerge as an area of study in its own right. Tom’s publications and my own played a part in that trend, but we were not the only ones: there were easily half a dozen people in Anthiope with similar interests, the esteemed Herr Doktor Stanislau von Lösberg not least among them.

Those half-dozen lived abroad, though, in places such as Eiverheim and Thiessin. In Scirland there was no one whose qualifications truly challenged Tom’s, now that he was a Colloquium Fellow. When a position opened up that called specifically for a dragon naturalist, he should have been the first choice—as indeed he was.

Any rumour which says he refused the position is false. Tom did not refuse. On the contrary, he told his prospective employers that he and I would be delighted to accept. When they said the offer was for him alone, he assured them I would not need a salary, as my recent speaking tours and publications had left me with quite a comfortable income. (As it happens I would have appreciated the salary, for my income did not go so far as it might—but I would have foregone that for such an opportunity.) They made it clear that regardless of finances, I was not welcome in this endeavour. Tom maintained that to hire him was to hire us both; they hired Arthur Halstaff, Baron Tavenor in our stead; and that was the end of that.

For a time.

A year and a half later, the employers in question came crawling back. Lord Tavenor had resigned his position; he had met with no success thus far, and had difficulty with the locals besides. The offer to Tom was renewed. So in turn was his condition—only this time he said that, upon reflection, a salary for me might be just the thing after all. He made it quite clear that if they did not see fit to meet his conditions, then they could go hang.

This is, in brief, how I came to be employed by the Royal Scirling Army in the deserts of Akhia, to raise for them their very own flight of dragons.

* * *

The problem of dragon-breeding was not a new one. Ever since prehistoric times, mankind has dreamt of harnessing dragons for his own ends. This has taken every form imaginable, from leaping atop the back of a fully grown dragon in the hope of breaking it to saddle—an attempt which almost invariably ends with a broken rider instead—to stealing hatchlings or eggs on the theory that a young creature is easier to tame, to caging dragons and optimistically encouraging them to breed.

That last is difficult to do even with less hazardous wild animals. Cheetahs, for example, are notoriously selective about their mating habits, and will go very rapidly from disinterest to ardour to mauling their erstwhile paramours. Others refuse the task entirely: whether it is for reasons of embarrassment or some other cause, the giant pandas of Yelang have never been known to reproduce within the confines of an imperial menagerie.

(I suppose I should offer fair warning. Because this volume of my memoirs concerns itself with my research in Akhia, it will of necessity say more than a little about the mating habits of dragons and other creatures. Those whose sensibilities are too delicate to endure such frankness might well be advised to have a more stout-hearted friend read them a carefully expurgated version. Though I fear that edition might be rather short.)

Dragons are even less tractable in this regard. The Yelangese in particular have a long history of trying to breed their dragons, but despite some rather grandiose historical claims, there is no reliable evidence of success with anything other than the smallest kinds. Large dragons, the sort that come to mind when one hears the word, simply will not cooperate.

And yet it was the cooperation of large dragons that we needed most, in the third decade of this century.

The reason, of course, was their bones. Astonishingly light and phenomenally strong, dragonbone is a wondrous substance… when one can get it. The bones decay rapidly after death, once their peculiar chemical composition is no longer protected by flesh and blood. A Chiavoran named Gaetano Rossi had developed a method for preserving them; Tom Wilker and I had stolen that method; it was stolen from us in turn, and sold to a company in Va Hing. Three years before I went to Akhia, it became public knowledge that the Yelangese were using dragonbone to build effective caeligers: airships that could be used for more than mere novelty.

“If you had shared what you knew with the Crown when you learned it,” Lord Rossmere said to Tom and myself during our first meeting, “we wouldn’t be in this situation now.”

I did not say to him that I had kept the information secret precisely to avoid our current situation. First, because it was only true in part; and second, because Tom was stepping firmly on my foot. He had worked quite hard to get us this opportunity, and did not want to see me squander it by speaking impertinently to a brigadier in the Royal Army. I offered instead a more temperate rendition of my thoughts. “I know it may not seem like it, but we do have an edge over the Yelangese. I believe our research into dragonbone synthesis is quite a bit further along than theirs, owing to the good efforts of Frederick Kemble. He had several years to work on the problem while the world knew nothing of it.”

Lord Rossmere ignored my comment, addressing his next words to Tom. “I shed no tears for the deaths of dragons, if they can be useful to us. I’m also a pragmatist, though. Scirland has already exhausted most of its productive iron mines, and thanks to your companion, we’ve also lost our foothold in Bayembe. If we kill half the dragons now for raw material, then in a generation we’ll be fighting over the few that remain. We need a renewable supply, and that means breeding them.”

None of this was news to either Tom or myself. Lord Rossmere was not speaking to inform us, though; all that was prelude to his next statement. He said, “Your work must be carried out under conditions of strict security. The formula for bone preservation may be out in the world, but nobody has yet had much luck with breeding. The nation that harnesses dragons for that purpose will have a lasting advantage over its rivals, and we do not intend to lose that chance.”

There would be at least two nations with this particular secret. Scirland had no true dragons left, only draconic cousins such as the sparklings with which I had begun my research so many years before. Politics make for peculiar bedfellows; in this instance, we were in bed with Akhia, whose desert drakes would be ideally suited for the purpose—if we could induce the beasts to cooperate.

Tom said, “We will of course do what we can. It will take a good deal more than two people to manage the necessary work, though… I believe Lord Tavenor had a staff to assist?”

“Yes, of course. Some Akhian labourers, and the site doubles as a barracks for our military contingent in Qurrat. There is a gentleman you will liaise with—” Lord Rossmere twitched aside a few papers, searching. “Husam ibn Ramiz ibn Khalis al-Aritati. A sheikh of one of their tribes. We’ve been assured of his trustworthiness.”

“I presume we will also have access to Lord Tavenor’s notes?” I said. “He has published nothing of his work. Obviously he met with no success, or else you would not be looking for his replacement; but we must know what he has done, so that we do not waste time repeating his errors.” Depending on what we found in his notes, I anticipated spending quite a bit of time repeating his errors, to see whether it was his theories or his methodology that had failed him. But Tom and I had discussed this beforehand, and my dutiful question was merely to set the stage for Tom’s own response.

His brow artfully furrowed, my companion said, “Yes, the lack of publications is rather troubling, for a scientific endeavour of this sort. It seems rather a waste. I realize that matters related to the breeding of dragons must be kept under wraps—but we would like an understanding that Dame Isabella and I may publish our other discoveries as we see fit.”

It was peculiar to hear Tom refer to me as “Dame Isabella.” We had not been so formal with one another since Mouleen; indeed, we had an unspoken agreement never to let differences in rank stand between us. Formality was necessary, however, when dealing with men like Lord Rossmere. The brigadier swelled with indignation. “Other discoveries? We are sending you there to breed dragons, not to run about studying whatever you like.”

“We will of course devote our full attention to that task,” I said, my tone as conciliatory as I could contrive. “But in the process of so doing, we will undoubtedly observe a thousand details of anatomy and behaviour that need not be state secrets. Mathieu Sémery has won a fair bit of acclaim in Thiessin with his study of wyverns in Bulskevo. I should not like to see Scirland lag behind in the eyes of the scientific community, simply because we kept mum about everything we might discover.”

This was not a situation where I could form a private vow to do as I wished, and the consequences be damned. That might suffice for the wearing of trousers in the field, or my friendships with various men come what rumours might result… but violating our arrangement with the Royal Army could land Tom and myself in prison. I was determined not to squander this opportunity, but first we needed Lord Rossmere’s consent.

Not bothering to hide his suspicion, he said, “What sort of things do you imagine you would publish?”

I racked my brains for the most tediously scientific topic imaginable. “Oh, perhaps… the grooming behaviour of the desert drake after feeding. Do they lick themselves clean, as cats do? Or do they perhaps roll in sand—and if so, what effect does this abrasion have on their scales—”

“Thank you, Dame Isabella, that will do.” I had succeeded in sufficiently boring Lord Rossmere. “You will submit any materials you write to Colonel Pensyth in Qurrat, along with a list of the publications and individuals to whom you wish to send them. He will consult with General Lord Ferdigan as necessary—but if they approve, then yes, you may publish. But those men will have final authority in the matter.”

I did not much relish the notion of military oversight, but this was likely the best Tom and I could hope for. “Thank you,” I said, and tried to sound sincere.

“How soon shall we begin?” Tom asked.

Lord Rossmere snorted. “If I could put you on a boat tomorrow, I would. Unless you find a way to make dragons grow to full size more rapidly, it will be years before we have an adequate supply—and that is if you succeed right away. The Yelangese have undoubtedly been pursuing the same goal; we have no time to waste.”

“Since you cannot put us on a boat tomorrow…” I prompted.

“How soon can you depart?”

His manner of asking made it clear that “the day after tomorrow” would be an ideal answer, and his mood would deteriorate with every subsequent day he was forced to wait. Tom and I exchanged glances. “This Selemer week?” Tom ventured.

I had traveled enough in my life to be able to do so efficiently. “That should be feasible,” I agreed.

“Splendid.” Lord Rossmere made a note of it and said, “I’ll write directly once we have your passage booked. Mr. Wilker, you’ll be lodged in the Men’s House in the Segulist Quarter of Qurrat. Dame Isabella, you’ll be living with a local family, one Shimon ben Nadav. Also Segulist, of course, though as you might expect, a Temple-worshipper. There are few Magisterials in Akhia, I fear. Furnishings and the like will be provided; there’s no need to pack your entire household.”

Rumour had it that Lord Tavenor had done just that, and been made to ship his belongings home at his own expense after he resigned his position. Fortunately for Lord Rossmere, I was accustomed to making do with quite little. Compared with my cabin aboard the Basilisk, even the most parsimonious of lodgings would seem downright palatial—if only because I could roam more freely outside of them.

There were of course a hundred other details to arrange, but trivial matters were not for the likes of Lord Rossmere. He called in his adjutant and made the necessary introductions; that officer would handle the remainder on his behalf. Then we were dismissed to our own business.

Tom and I descended the stairs and went out into the bustling streets of Drawbury, which in those days still held the headquarters of the Royal Army in Falchester. We stood for a moment in silence, watching people go by; then, as if by a silent accord, we turned to regard one another.

“Akhia,” Tom said, a grin touching his expression.

“Indeed.” I knew why his grin had not fully come to rest. My own excitement was tempered with apprehension. Our research aboard the Basilisk had been carried out partially under the auspices of other groups—the Scirling Geographical Association, the Ornithological Society—but that was quite different from the kind of oversight that now loomed over us.

I would never say it to Tom, who had fought so hard for my inclusion in this enterprise, but I was not entirely sanguine about the prospect of working for the Royal Army. My adventures abroad had tangled me in such affairs on several occasions, but I had never sought them out deliberately before now. And I knew very well that if we succeeded in breeding dragons as the Crown desired, we would in effect be reducing them to the status of livestock: creatures fed and raised to adulthood in captivity, only so they could be slaughtered for human benefit.

The alternative, however, was worse. If dragons could not be bred, then they would only be hunted; the wild populations would be depleted in short order. I had grown up in the countryside, where the slaughter of sheep and fowl was entirely commonplace. I must persuade myself to think of the dragons in those terms—however difficult such thoughts might be.

Tom and I walked to the corner of Rafter Street, where a hansom cab might be hailed. By that point in my life I had enough money to maintain a carriage of my own if I wished, but I had gotten out of the habit. (My friends later had to persuade me that while Mrs. Camherst or Dame Isabella might do as she wished, it was not fitting for Lady Trent to go about in hired vehicles.) Once settled in and on our way, Tom caught my gaze and asked, “Will you look for him?”

There was no point in pretending I did not know who Tom was talking about. There was little more in pretending carelessness, but I did my best—more for the sake of my own dignity than out of any hope of deceiving Tom. “I doubt I could find him if I tried,” I said, gazing out the window at the city rattling past. “There must be a great many men in Akhia named Suhail.”

Our erstwhile companion from the Basilisk, the man who had gone with me to the cursed isle of Rahuahane, who had stolen a Yelangese caeliger and tried to rescue a princess. I had given him my direction in Falchester before we parted company in Phetayong, but had not received a single letter in the nearly three years since. Possibly he had lost the notebook page upon which I scrawled the information. But it was not so difficult to find me; there were few lady dragon naturalists in the world, and only one named Isabella Camherst.

My words were a mask for that sorrow, but also a nod to the truth. As well as I thought I knew Suhail, I knew very little about him: not his father’s name, not his family name, not even the city in which he lived.

As if he could hear those thoughts, Tom said, “I imagine the population of archaeologists named Suhail is rather smaller.”

“Presuming he still engages in such work,” I said with a sigh. “I had the distinct impression that his father’s death meant he was being called home to his duties. He may have been forced to lay aside his own interests.”

Although I meant my comment to be temperate, the word “forced” betrayed my own feelings. I had once forsworn all my customary interests for the sake of my family; the “grey years,” as I called them, had been one of the dreariest periods of my life—surpassed only by the time spent mourning my husband Jacob. I knew Suhail’s passion for his work; I could not imagine him giving it up without a qualm.

“You could ask around,” Tom said gently. “What harm could there be?”

Embarrassment for Suhail’s family, perhaps—but having never met them, knowing nothing of them, I found it hard to muster much concern for their feelings. And yet, I did not want to get my own hopes up, only to see them dashed. “Perhaps,” I said. Tom was kind enough to let me leave it at that.

* * *

I did not have much leisure for melancholy after I returned to my Hart Square townhouse. If we were to leave in a week and a half, there was no time to lose. I sent the maid to begin an inventory of my travel wardrobe, and went into my study to consider which books I would bring along.

My study had, over the years, become a source of deep and quiet pleasure to me. It was not elegant, as some gentlemen’s studies are; one might rather call it “cluttered.” Apart from the books, I had notes, maps, sketches and finished paintings, field specimens, and assorted knick-knacks collected in my travels. Shells acquired by my son Jake weighed down stacks of paper; the replica of the egg I had taken from Rahuahane propped up a shelf of books. (The firestone carved out of the albumen of the real egg was still mostly hidden atop my wardrobe, although I had shaped a few of the pieces and sold them for funds along the way.) High on the wall, above the shelves, a series of plaster cast footprints marched in an unsteady line: the fossilized tracks of a prehistoric dragon, discovered the year before by Konrad Vigfusson in southern Otholé.

A large claw sat on my desk, where I had left it that morning. The claw was a complete mystery, sent to me by a fossilhunter in Isnats; he guessed its age to be tens of thousands of years old, if not more. It was a fascinating glimpse into the distant past of dragons… presuming, of course, that the claw did indeed come from a dragon. The fossil-hunter had found no associated bones, which would ordinarily aid in classifying a specimen. In this instance, the lack of bones might be the identifier: if the owner of the claw had been a “true” dragon, then of course its bones would have decayed too rapidly for fossilization. (Although preservation can occur in nature, the chemical conditions for it are sufficiently rare as to make fossil dragon bones nearly unknown—although a great many hucksters and confidence men would have you believe otherwise.)

So: grant that it may have been a dragon. If so, then it was one of prodigious size, dwarfing even the largest breeds known today, as the claw measured nearly thirty centimeters around the curve from base to tip. Tom theorized that the claw might have been out of proportion to the rest of the dragon, which certainly made biological sense; what the purpose of such an overgrown talon might have been, however, is still a puzzle today. Hunting, defense, the attraction of mates… we have many guesses, but no facts.

My study also contained a box, high up on one shelf, whose battered exterior suggested that nothing of particular inter est was contained therein. Unknown to any but Tom and myself, it held my greatest treasure.

This I lifted down, after first ensuring my door was locked. Shorn of its lid, it disclosed various plaster lumps held together with bits of wire. This, as readers of the previous volume may recall, was the cast I had taken of the gaps inside the Rahuahane egg—the emptiness where once an embryo had been.

The cast, unfortunately, was far too delicate to risk on a sea journey to Akhia, and as near to irreplaceable as made no difference. I had studied it a hundred times and drawn its appearance from every angle; the sketches I could take with me. Nothing replaced the experience of looking at it directly, though, and so I examined it one last time, fixing its shape in my mind.

I believed—but could not yet prove—that it constituted evidence of a lost breed of dragon, one which the ancient Draconeans had indeed tamed, as the legends said. Those legends had always been doubtful, owing to the intractability of most dragon types, but a breed now lost to us might have been more cooperative. Indeed, I sometimes wondered if that cooperative nature was why the breed was lost: we have so thoroughly domesticated certain kinds of dogs that they can no longer survive in the wild. If the Draconeans had developed such a creature, it might well have died out after the collapse of their civilization.

Such thoughts were mere speculation, though. Even the shape of the embryo was uncertain, owing to the petrification of the albumen and the flaws of the cast; who could guess what the adult form might have looked like? We knew too little of dragon embryology to say.

But with enough time in Akhia—and enough failed hatchings, which were inevitable—I might find a better answer.

A knock came at my study door. “One moment,” I called out, replacing the cast in its box, and standing atop a chair to put it once more on its disregarded shelf. A pang of guilt went through me as I did so: who was I to grumble about the Royal Army keeping its naturalists mum, when I myself was sitting on this kind of scientific secret? Nor was it the only one: I had two valuable pieces of information not yet shared with the world, and the other one was stuffed into a desk drawer a meter behind me.

The trouble with the cast was that I did not want to say where I had gotten it. My own landing on Rahuahane had been inadvertent; others would go on purpose, if they knew about the ruin there. And those others would become a flood if they knew that the cache of eggs there also constituted a massive cache of unshaped firestone. I had struggled since the day I made that cast to think of a plausible story for its origins that would not either distort true information with false or give away too much. I had yet to succeed.

As for the paper in my desk… there, my motivations were not a tenth so noble.

“Come in,” I called, once I was down and away from the relevant shelf.

The door opened to admit Natalie Oscott. Once my livein companion, she had moved to her own lodgings shortly after Jake went away to school. “He does not need a tutor any longer,” she said at the time, “and you need more space for books.” This latter was something of a polite dodge. I had once promised to qualify her for a life of independent and eccentric spinsterhood; that had since been achieved, though I could hardly take the credit for it. Natalie had found her calling in engineering, and a circle of like-minded friends to go with it, who kept her tolerably employed. Her finances were somewhat strait—certainly far less than she could have expected in life had she remained a proper member of Society—but she could pay her own bills now, and chose to do so. I could hardly stand in her way; although with Jake gone, I sometimes missed having company in the house.

She gave me a curious look as she came in. “Living alone has done odd things to you. What were you up to, that I had to wait in the hall?”

“Oh, you know me,” I said with an airy smile. “Dancing about with my knickers on my head. I couldn’t let you see. Please, have a seat—did Tom tell you the news?”

“That you’re leaving next week? Yes, he did.” They did not live in the same neighbourhood, but it would not have been much out of Tom’s way home for him to stop by the workshop where Natalie and her friends tinkered with their devices. “What will you do with the house?”

I sat down behind my desk and slid a fresh sheet of paper onto my blotter. “Close it up, I think. I can afford to do that now, and this is dreadfully short notice to be looking for a temporary tenant. Though you’re welcome to the place if you like; you still have a key, after all.”

“No, closing it makes sense. I’ll come in for books, though, if you don’t mind me playing librarian on your behalf.”

That was an excellent thought, and I thanked her for it. The so-called “Flying University” that had begun in my sitting room was now a whole flock of gatherings, taking place in many houses around Falchester, but my library still occupied a vital position in that web. Though of course my shelves did not cover every topic—which gave me another thought. “I also have a few books that should be returned to their owners. One from Peter Landenbury, I think, and two or three from Georgina Hunt.”

“I’ll take them,” Natalie said. “You have enough to concern yourself with. Is that a letter to Jake that you are writing?”

It was, though I had not gotten any farther than the date and salutation. How does one tell one’s thirteen-year-old son that one is leaving for a foreign country in a week—not to return for who knew how long—and he is not permitted to come?

Natalie knew Jake as well as I did. Laughing, she said, “Be sure to examine the contents of your traveling chests before the ship casts off. Otherwise you may arrive in Akhia and find your son folded in with your hats.”

“Akhia is a desert, and therefore much less interesting to him.” But Jake would want to come along regardless. When he was very young, I had left him behind so I might go to Eriga; when he was older, I atoned for that abandonment by bringing him on my voyage around the world. The act had given him Notions. It was true that Jake’s greatest love was the sea, but more generally, he had it fixed in his head that traveling to foreign parts was something every boy should do on a regular schedule. I had enrolled him at the best school my rank and finances could arrange—Suntley College, which in those days was not quite in the upper tier—but for a boy who had gone swimming with dragon turtles, it was unavoidably tedious.

Thoughts of my son should not have led me to animals, but they did. After all, Jake was no longer dependent on me for care and feeding, but other creatures were. “Do you want the honeyseekers? Or shall I ask Miriam?”

Natalie made a face. “I should be a good friend and tell you that I will take them, but the truth is that I fall asleep at the workshop too often to be responsible for anything living. I should hate for you to come home and find your pets are dead.”

“Miriam it is, then.” They were not birds, which were Miriam Farnswood’s specialty, but she liked them well enough despite that. I set my pen aside, knowing that I would need my full attention for the letter to Jake, and steepled my fingers. “What am I missing?”

“Respectable clothing for when you are in town; trousers for when you are not. Hats. No, you’ll want a scarf, won’t you, to cover your hair? Your anatomical compendium. They will have scalpels and magnifying glasses and so forth waiting for you there, I presume, and Mr. Wilker has the set you gave him—but better safe than sorry. I’m told Akhians have a kind of oil or paste they use to protect their skin from the sun; you might want to acquire some.” Natalie rolled her eyes heavenward, studying my ceiling as if a list might be found there. “Do they have malaria in Akhia?”

“I believe so. But I shall have to take my chances: Amaneen do not approve of drinking.” Some were more observant than others, of course; but I did not want to give the wrong impression from the start by showing up with a case of gin in my baggage.

She inquired after my living arrangements, which I described; then she said, “Tents? Other gear for camping?”

“Lord Rossmere made it rather clear I am expected to stay in Qurrat and work on my assignment for the army.”

Natalie regarded me with an ironical eye, and I laughed. “Yes, yes. I know. But if I should happen to go wandering out into the desert in search of things to learn, I am sure I can acquire suitable tents from a local merchant. Also the camel to carry them for me.”

“Then you are prepared,” Natalie said. “As much as you can ever be.”

Which was to say, not half prepared enough. But I had long since resigned myself to that fact.

* * *

I could not help but think on the past when Tom and I met in Sennsmouth and looked out at the ship that would bear us to Akhia.

Fourteen years before, we had stood in almost this precise spot, preparing to depart for Vystrana. But there were four of us then: myself and Jacob, Tom and his patron Lord Hilford. Jacob had not lived to come home again, and Lord Hilford had passed away the previous spring, after many years of worsening health. I was pleased he had at least lived to see his protégé become a Colloquium Fellow, though I had not been able to follow suit.

Tom’s thoughts must have gone along similar lines, for he said, “This isn’t much like our first departure.”

“No,” I agreed. “But I think they both would have been pleased to see where we are now.”

The wind was brisk and biting, causing me to think longingly of the desert heat that lay ahead. (I was somewhat erroneous in so doing: even in southern Anthiope, Acinis is not the warmest month. It was, however, warmer there than in Scirland.) If I felt a chill, though, I had only to cast my thoughts upon what lay in my future: the desert drakes of Akhia.

They are in many respects the quintessential dragons, the sort that come to mind the instant one hears the word. Scales as gold as the sun, giving rise to legends that dragons hoard gold and sleep atop mountainous piles of it, until their hides are plated with the precious metal; fiery breath that sears like the desert summer itself. I had seen many kinds of dragons in the course of my career, including some whose claim to the name was exceedingly tenuous… but the closest I had ever been to a desert drake was when I gazed upon a runt in the king’s menagerie, so many years before. Now, at last, I would see them in their full glory.

I said, “Thank you, Tom. I know I have said it before, and likely I will say it again—but it bears repeating. This opportunity I owe entirely to you.”

“And to your own work,” he said defensively. But then he smiled ruefully and added, “You’re welcome. And thank you. We got here together.”

His tone was awkward enough that I said nothing more. I merely lifted my face to the sea wind and waited for the ship that would bear me to Akhia.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2016/03/22/excerpts-in-the-labyrinth-of-drakes-marie-brennan/feed/9Five Things Epic Fantasy Writers Could Learn from Dorothy Dunnetthttps://www.tor.com/2015/06/29/five-things-epic-fantasy-writers-could-learn-from-dorothy-dunnett/
https://www.tor.com/2015/06/29/five-things-epic-fantasy-writers-could-learn-from-dorothy-dunnett/#commentsMon, 29 Jun 2015 18:00:44 +0000http://www.tor.com/?p=180869Dorothy Dunnett is one of those authors you hear about through word of mouth. She didn’t write fantasy—unless you count taking sixteenth-century belief in astrology as true from the perspective of her characters—but ask around, and you’ll find that a surprising number of SF/F authors have been influenced by her work. The Lymond Chronicles and […]]]>

Dorothy Dunnett is one of those authors you hear about through word of mouth. She didn’t write fantasy—unless you count taking sixteenth-century belief in astrology as true from the perspective of her characters—but ask around, and you’ll find that a surprising number of SF/F authors have been influenced by her work. The Lymond Chronicles and the House of Niccolò, her two best-known series, are sweeping masterpieces of historical fiction; one even might call them epic. And indeed, writers of epic fantasy could learn a great many lessons from Lady Dunnett. Here are but five, all illustrated with examples from the first book of the Lymond Chronicles, The Game of Kings.

1. Point of View

Most epic fantasy novels these days are written in multiple third limited, shifting from character to character to show events in different places or from different angles. Given that epic fantasy is expected to range across a broad sweep of locations and plots, it’s a necessary device.

Or is it?

Omniscient perspective may be out of style these days, but reading through the Lymond Chronicles, I keep being struck by how useful it is, especially to the would-be writer of an epic. I don’t mean the type of omniscience you may remember from children’s books, where the narrator is talking to the reader; that usually comes across as twee, unless you have a very good context for it. I mean the sort that has full range of movement, sometimes drawing in close to give you a certain character’s thoughts for an extended period of time, other times shifting to give you several perspectives on the scene, and occasionally pulling all the way back to give you a god’s eye view of events.

The benefit this offers to an epic fantasy writer can be demonstrated any time Dunnett has to discuss the larger board on which her pieces are moving. She can, with a few elegantly-written paragraphs, remind the reader of the political and military forces moving in France, Spain, England and Scotland—and she can do it actively, with lines like this one:

“Charles of Spain, Holy Roman Emperor, fending off Islam at Prague and Lutherism in Germany and forcing recoil from the long, sticky fingers at the Vatican, cast a considering glance at heretic England.”

The plain expository version of that would be a good deal more dull, robbed of personality and movement, because it could not show you what the Holy Roman Emperor was doing: it could only tell you. To liven it up, the writer of third limited would need to make her characters have a conversation about Spanish politics, or else jump to a character who’s in a position to see such things on the ground. And that latter choice offers two pitfalls of its own: either the character in question is a nonentity, transparently employed only to get this information across, or he gets built up into a character worth following… which rapidly leads you down the primrose path of plot sprawl. (I was a longtime fan of the Wheel of Time; I know whereof I speak.)

But the omniscient approach lets you control the flow of information as needed, whether that’s the minutiae of a character’s emotional reaction or the strategic layout of an entire region as armies move into position. In fact, it permeates everything about the story, including many of my following points—which is why I put it first.

2. How to Write Politics

I will admit that Dunnett had a leg up on her fantasy counterparts where politics are concerned, because history handed her a great deal of what she needed. For example, she didn’t have to invent the ambiguous loyalties of the Douglas family, playing both sides of the game at once; she only had to convey the result to the reader.

Of course, if you think that’s easy, I have some lovely seafront property in Nebraska to sell you.

Real politics are hard. I’ve read any number of fantasy novels where the political machinations have all the depth of kindergartners arguing in a sandbox, because the writers don’t understand how many variables need to go into the equation. Dunnett understood—and more importantly, was good at conveying—the interplay of pragmatism, ideology, and personal sentiment that made up actual history. There’s one point in The Game of Kings where two characters have a remarkably level-headed conversation about the three-cornered political triangle of England, Scotland, and France, and one of them lays out a hypothetical scenario that might, if followed, have averted a lot of the troubles of the later Tudor period. The dry response: “It isn’t any use getting intelligent about it.”

It doesn’t matter how good an idea is if you can’t make it happen. And the things that can get in the way are legion: lack of supplies, or supplies in the wrong place to be of use. Ideological conviction that won’t back down. Even just two individuals who loathe one another too much to ever cooperate, despite the benefit it would bring to them both. When I was studying the politics of the Elizabethan period for Midnight Never Come, there was a point where I threw my hands up in the air and said “they’re all a bunch of high school students.” Cliquish behavior, pointless grudges, people flouncing off in a huff because they don’t feel properly appreciated—it’s sad to admit, but these are as much a cause of strife as grand causes like nationalism or the need for resources.

Dunnett keeps track of these things, and makes sure they slam into one another at interesting angles. You could map out the plots to her novels by charting the trajectories of various personalities, propelled onward by loyalty or obligation or hatred or simple irritation, seeing where each one turns the course of another, until it all reaches its conclusion.
(And, as per above: her ability to step back and convey the larger political scene through omniscient perspective helps a lot.)

3. How to Write a Fight Scene

I’ve studied fencing. I’m just a few months away from my black belt in shorin-ryu karate. I used to do combat choreography for theatre. Fight scenes are a sufficiently major interest of mine that I’ve written an entire ebook on how to design them and commit them to the page.

And I’m here to tell you, The Game of Kings contains the single best duel I have ever read in a novel.

It is good enough that I’ve used it as a teaching text on multiple occasions. I won’t say that every fight in fiction should be exactly like it; scenes like that should always fit their surrounding story, and if you aren’t writing a story like Dunnett’s, you’ll need to vary your approach. She’s writing in omniscient; that means she can set the scene from the perspective of a camera, then shift throughout the duel to show us the thoughts of the spectators or the combatants, all the while keeping the motives of her protagonist tantalizingly opaque. A first-person fight would read very differently, as would a scene depicting armies in the field. But regardless of what kind of fight you’re trying to describe, you can learn from Dunnett.

Can you think of a descriptive element that might make the scene more vivid? It’s in there, without ever reaching the point of distraction for the reader. Want high stakes? Oh, absolutely—at every level from the individual to the nation. She ratchets up the tension, changes the flow of the duel as it progresses, and wraps it all up in beautiful narration. It’s gorgeous.

I can only hope someday to produce something as good.

4. How to Write a Good Gary Stu

“Gary Stu” doesn’t get thrown around as often as its sister term, “Mary Sue”—probably because we’re more accustomed to watching or reading about good-looking, uber-talented guys who accrue followers without half trying. But characters of that sort are rarely memorable on an emotional level: we love watching James Bond beat up bad guys, but how often do you think about his inner life? How much is he a person to you, rather than an idealized archetype?

I will be the first to admit that Lymond is a dyed-in-the-wool Gary Stu. But he’s also a fabulous character, and I want to pick apart why.

Some of it begins with Dunnett’s manipulation of point of view. Remember how I said her omniscient perspective shifts from place to place, constantly adjusting its distance? Well, in The Game of Kings she pulls a remarkable stunt: the one perspective she doesn’t give you is Lymond’s. The whole way through the book, the closest you get to his head is the occasional fleeting touch.

I wouldn’t recommend trying this nowadays; your editor would probably think you’ve lost your mind. But it does demonstrate the value of seeing your Gary Stu or Mary Sue through someone else’s eyes, which is that it makes admiration for them feel more natural. If I were in Lymond’s head while he makes people dance like puppets, he would either feel arrogant, or (if downplaying his own achievements) obtrusively modest. Seeing it from the perspective of other characters gives you more distance, and room to explore their various reactions. They can be impressed by what he’s doing, even when they’re afraid or annoyed or trying to stop him.

Which brings me to my second point: Lymond is flawed. And I don’t mean the sort of flaws that usually result when a writer gets told “you need to give your protagonist some flaws.” He doesn’t have a random phobia of spiders or something. No, he’s the one character whose story has ever made me feel like a weak-kneed fangirl, while simultaneously wanting to punch him in the face. And better still, sometimes the people around him do punch him in the face! And he deserves it! Lymond has a vile temper, and also a tendency to distract people from his real goals by being a complete asshole at them. So any admiration of his talents is distinctly tempered by the way he employs them.

The third aspect is the real doozy, because it requires a lot of hard work on the part of the author: despite his brilliance and countless talents, Lymond still fails.

Time and again throughout the series, Dunnett engineers scenarios that are too much even for her amazing protagonist. He has a good plan, but something he didn’t know about and couldn’t account for screws him over. He has a good plan, but it hinges on the assistance of other people, and one of them doesn’t come through. He has a good plan, but even his superhuman endurance can’t get him through everything and he is passed out cold at a key moment.

These aren’t cosmetic failures, either. They carry real cost. When Lymond says “I shaped [my fate] twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands,” you believe him, because you’ve watched it shatter once already. And when he achieves a victory… he’s earned it.

5. How to Include Women

Since Dunnett is writing historical fiction, with no fantasy component, it would be easy to let it pass without comment if her story included very few women. Instead the opposite is true—and she does it all within the bounds of realistic history.

Sure, there are a few characters who are of the “exceptional” type we usually think of in this context. The later books of the Lymond Chronicles, for example, contain an Irish revolutionary and a diabolically clever concubine. But around them are a lot of other women who are perfectly ordinary, and more or less reasonable for their period.

Take, for example, Kate Somerville—much beloved of many fans. What is her role in The Game of Kings? She runs her family’s household on the English side of the Scottish border. But that means she’s responsible for taking care of a wounded guest… and she manages to get more out of Lymond than most of the guys who try for it. Plus, if you think she’s blind to the politics that could light her house on fire at any moment, you don’t have a very realistic impression of historical life. Or consider Agnes Herries, the thirteen-year-old Scottish heiress who reads like a hard-headed version of Sansa Stark: her indulgence in romantic fantasies is a deliberate counter to her awareness that her value is in her inheritance. Agnes could have been a side note, but she plays a role that is all the more pivotal for being understated.

I could list more. Richard’s wife Mariotta, who makes a foil for Janet Beaton: one of those women plays an effective role in politics by way of her husband, and the other does not. Margaret Lennox, one of the aforementioned Douglasses and one of the biggest threats to Lymond’s life and sanity, without ever putting her hand on a weapon. Sybilla, Lymond’s mother, who gives you a very clear sense of where Lymond got his brilliance from, and uses her own to great effect. Christian Stewart, who despite being blind is absolutely vital to the story on every level. Their attitudes at time veer a little bit out of period—not entirely modern, but perhaps more eighteenth century than sixteenth—but the actions they take aren’t unreasonable for the time. And they are also relevant, interesting, and effective.

It can be done.

Oh, and did I mention? The Game of Kings was Dunnett’s first published novel.

If you like stories that balance grand political action against intense character drama—or if you want to write such things—her historical novels are absolutely worth picking up. I won’t claim it’s easy to get into; she has a tendency to leave things for the reader to infer from surrounding clues (which has famously resulted in many first-time readers of The Game of Kings wailing “BUT WHY IS THE PIG DRUNK???”). She also likes to quote things in foreign languages without translating them. But once you get the hang of her style, there is so much to admire; I envy anyone who is about to discover her work.

Marie Brennan habitually pillages her background in anthropology, archaeology, and folklore for fictional purposes. She is the author of the Onyx Court series, the Doppelganger duology of Warrior and Witch, and the urban fantasy Lies and Prophecy, as well as more than thirty short stories. The first book in the Lady Trent Memoirs series, A Natural History of Dragons, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2015/06/29/five-things-epic-fantasy-writers-could-learn-from-dorothy-dunnett/feed/27Voyage of the Basilisk (Excerpt)https://www.tor.com/2015/02/23/voyage-of-the-basilisk-excerpt-marie-brennan/
https://www.tor.com/2015/02/23/voyage-of-the-basilisk-excerpt-marie-brennan/#commentsMon, 23 Feb 2015 19:00:00 +0000http://www.tor.com?p=153615&preview_id=153615Six years after her perilous exploits in Eriga, Isabella embarks on her most ambitious expedition yet: a two-year trip around the world to study all manner of dragons in every place they might be found.]]>

Devoted readers of Lady Trent’s earlier memoirs, A Natural History of Dragons and The Tropic of Serpents, may believe themselves already acquainted with the particulars of her historic voyage aboard the Royal Survey Ship Basilisk, but the true story of that illuminating, harrowing, and scandalous journey has never been revealed—until now.

Six years after her perilous exploits in Eriga, Isabella embarks on her most ambitious expedition yet: a two-year trip around the world to study all manner of dragons in every place they might be found. From feathered serpents sunning themselves in the ruins of a fallen civilization to the mighty sea serpents of the tropics, these creatures are a source of both endless fascination and frequent peril. Accompanying her is not only her young son, Jake, but a chivalrous foreign archaeologist whose interests converge with Isabella’s in ways both professional and personal.

Science is, of course, the primary objective of the voyage, but Isabella’s life is rarely so simple. She must cope with storms, shipwrecks, intrigue, and warfare, even as she makes a discovery that offers a revolutionary new insight into the ancient history of dragons.

The thrilling adventure of Lady Trent continues in Marie Brennan’s Voyage of the Basilisk, available March 31st from Tor Books!

PREFACE

Depending upon your temperament, you may be either pleased or puzzled to see that I have chosen to include my time upon the Basilisk in my memoirs. It was, of course, a lengthy period in my life, totaling nearly two years in duration, and the discoveries I made in that time were not insignificant, nor were the effects of that journey upon my personal life. Seen from that perspective, it would seem odd were I to pass it by.

But those of you who are puzzled have good cause. Those two years are, after all, the most thoroughly documented period in my life. My contract with the Winfield Courier to provide them with regular reports meant that a great many in Scirland were kept apprised of my doings—quite apart from the reports that were written about me by others. Furthermore, my travelogue was later collected and printed as Around the World in Search of Dragons, and that title is still readily available from the publisher. Why, then, should I trouble to tell a story which is already so widely known?

Apart from the oddity of glossing over so major a period in my life, I have several reasons. The first is that my essays in the Winfield Courier were heavily skewed toward matters of exotic novelty, which was, after all, what their readers wanted to hear, though not the most apt depiction of my own experiences. Another is that I said little there of my personal affairs, and as a memoir is expected to be more personal, this is the ideal place to provide those elements which I excluded before.

But above all, this volume is intended to set the record straight, for part of what I said in those essays is an outright lie.

When I wrote to the Winfield Courier that I swam to Lahana after my adventure with the sea-serpent, and that during the excitement which followed I took a knock to the head and had to be sent to Phetayong to convalesce, not a word of it was true. I wrote those lines because I had no choice: my lengthy silence (which had persuaded a great many people back home that I was dead at last) must be broken with some kind of tale, and I could not give the honest one. Even had I wished to make public everything I had done, a high-ranking officer in His Majesty’s Royal Navy had forbidden me to do so. Indeed, it is only with some effort now that I have persuaded certain government officials to change their minds—now, so many years later, when a new dynasty rules in Yelang and the events in question are no longer of any particular political relevance.

But they have granted their permission, and so at last I may tell the truth. I will not attempt to recount every day of my journey aboard the Basilisk; two years will not fit into one slim volume without substantial abridgement, and there is no point in repeating what I have said elsewhere. I shall instead focus on those portions which are either personal (and therefore new) or necessary to understanding what occurred at the end of my island sojourn.

All in good time, of course. Before the truth comes out, you will hear of Jacob and Tom Wilker; Heali’i and Suhail; and Dione Aekinitos, the mad captain of the Basilisk. You will also hear of wonders terrestrial and aquatic, ancient ruins and modern innovations, mighty storms, near drownings, the rigors of life at sea, and more kinds of dragon than you can shake a wing at. Though there is a great deal I will omit here, I will endeavour to make my tale as complete and engaging as I may.

Isabella, Lady Trent
Casselthwaite, Linshire
3 Seminis, 5660

ONE

At no point did I form the conscious intention of founding an ad hoc university in my sitting room. It happened, as it were, by accident.

The process began soon after Natalie Oscott became my live-in companion, having been disowned by her father for running away to Eriga. My finances could not long support the two of us in my accustomed style, especially not with my growing son to consider. I had to surrender some portion of my life as it had been until then, and since I was unwilling to surrender my scholarship, other things had to go.

What went was the house in Pasterway. Not without a pang; it had been my home for several years, even if I had spent a goodly percentage of that time in foreign countries, and I had fond memories of the place. Moreover, it was the only home little Jacob had known, and I did question for some time whether it was advisable to uproot so young a boy, much less to transplant him into the chaotic environment of a city. It was, however, far more economical for us to take up residence in Falchester, and so in the end we went.

Ordinarily, of course, city life is far more expensive than rural— even when the “rural” town in question is Pasterway, which nowadays has become a direct suburb of the capital. But much of this expense assumes that one is living in the city for the purpose of enjoying its glittering social life: concerts and operas, art exhibitions and fashion, balls and drums and sherry breakfasts. I had no interest in such matters. My concern was with intellectual commerce, and in that regard Falchester was not only superior but much cheaper.

There I could make use of the splendid Alcroft lending library, now better known as one of the foundational institutions of the Royal Libraries. This saved me a great deal of expense, as my research needs had grown immensely, and to purchase everything I required (or to send books back to helpful friends via the post) would have bankrupted me in short order. I could also attend what lectures would grant a woman entrance, without the trouble of several hours’ drive; indeed, I no longer needed to maintain a carriage and all its associated equipment and personnel, but rather could hire one as necessary. The same held true for visits with friends, and here it is that the so-called “Flying University” began to take shape.

The early stages of it were driven by my need for a governess. Natalie Oscott, though a good companion to me, had no wish to take on the responsibility of raising and educating my son. I therefore cast my net for someone who would, taking pains to specify in advance that my household was not at all a usual one.

The lack of a husband was, for some applicants, a selling point. I imagine many of my readers are aware of the awkward position in which governesses often find themselves—or rather, the awkward position into which their male employers often put them, for it does no one any service to pretend this happens by some natural and inexorable process, devoid of connection with anyone’s behaviour. My requirements for their qualifications, however, were off-putting to many. Mathematics were unnecessary, as Natalie was more than willing to tutor my son in arithmetic, algebra, and geometry (and would, by the time he was ready for calculus, have taught it to herself), but I insisted upon a solid grounding in literature, languages, and a variety of sciences, not to mention the history not only of Scirland but other countries as well. This made the process of reviewing applicants quite arduous. But it paid an interesting dividend: by the time I hired Abigail Carew, I had also made the acquaintance of a number of young ladies who lacked sufficient learning, yet possessed the desire for it in spades.

I will not pretend I founded the Flying University in order to educate unsatisfactory governess candidates. Indeed, most of those young ladies I never saw again, as they moved on in search of less stringent employers. But the experience heightened my awareness of that lack in our society, and so once I had my subscription to the Alcroft, I made the contents of my library (both owned and borrowed) available to anyone who wished to make use of it.

The result was that, by the time my sea expedition began, on any given Athemer evening you might find anywhere from two to twenty people occupying my sitting room and study. The former room was a place of quiet reading, where friends might educate themselves on any subject my library could supply. Indeed, by then its reach extended far beyond my own shelves and items borrowed from the Alcroft, as it became a trading center for those who wished to avail themselves of others’ resources. Candles and lamps were one point upon which I did not scrimp, and so they could read in perfect comfort.

The study, by contrast, was a place of conversation. Here we might ask questions of one another, or debate issues on which we held differing views. Often these discussions became quite convivial, the lot of us raising one another up from the darkness of ignorance and into the light of, if not wisdom, then at least wellinformed curiosity.

On other occasions, the discussions might better be termed “arguments.”

“You know I love wings as much as the next woman,” I said to Miriam Farnswood—who, as a lady ornithologist, was the next woman, and very fond of wings. “But you are overstating their significance in this instance. Bats fly, and so do insects, and yet no one is suggesting that they are close relatives of birds.”

“No one yet has found evidence of bats laying eggs,” she said dryly. Miriam was nearly twenty years my senior, and it was only in the last six months that I had ventured to address her by her given name. Not coincidentally, the last six months had also seen the commencement of this particular debate, in which we were very much at odds. “It’s your own work that persuades me, Isabella; I don’t know why you resist so strenuously. The skeletal structure of dragons shows many resemblances to that of birds.”

She was referring, of course, to the hollow structure of the bones. This was not often to be found in reptiles, which I championed as the nearest relation to dragons. I said impatiently, “Hollow bones may easily be evolved on separate occasions. After all, that is what seems to have happened with wings, is it not? Much less common to evolve a new set of forelegs, where none were before.”

“You think it more plausible that reptiles suddenly evolved wings, where none had previously been?” Miriam snorted. It was not a very ladylike snort. She was the sort of woman one expected to find tramping the countryside in tweeds with a gun under her arm and a bulldog at her side, probably one of her own breeding. The delicacy with which she moved when out birding was nothing short of startling. “Please, Isabella. By that reasoning, you should be arguing for their relation to insects. At least those have more than four limbs.”

The reference to insects diverted me from what I had been about to say. “Sparklings do complicate the picture,” I admitted. “I really am persuaded that they are an extremely dwarfish breed of dragon—though I am at a loss to explain how such a reduction in size might come about. Even those tiny dogs they have in Coyahuac are not so much smaller than the largest breed of hound.”

My comment brought a quiet chuckle from a few feet away. Tom Wilker had been in conversation with the suffragette Lucy Devere, discussing the politics of the Synedrion, but their talk had momentarily flagged, and he had overheard me. It was not the first time he had been subjected to my thoughts on sparklings, which were an endless conundrum to me in matters of taxonomy.

We could hardly avoid eavesdropping on one another’s words. My Hart Square townhouse was not so large as to give us much in the way of elbow room. And indeed, I often preferred it that way, for it encouraged us to wander from topic to topic and group to group, rather than separating off into little clusters for the duration of the evening. Tabitha Small and Peter Landenbury had been sharing their thoughts on a recent work of history, but as usual, Lucy had drawn them into her orbit. With Elizabeth Hardy rounding out their set, there were seven of us in my study, which more or less filled it to capacity.

Miriam’s eyebrows had gone up at my digression from the point. I shook my head to clear it and said, “Be that as it may. I think you are reading too much into the fact that the quetzalcoatls of Coyahuac have feathers. They are not true dragons, by Edgeworth’s definition—”

“Oh, come now, Isabella,” she said. “You can hardly use Edgeworth as your defense, when you yourself have led the charge in questioning his entire theory.”

“I have not yet reached any conclusions,” I said firmly. “Ask me again when this expedition is done. With any luck, I will observe a feathered serpent with my own eyes, and then I will be able to say with more certainty where they fit in the draconic family.”

The door opened quietly, and Abby Carew slipped through. She looked tired, even in the forgiving candlelight. Jake had been running her ragged lately. The prospect of going on a sea voyage had so fired his imagination that he could hardly be made to sit at his lessons.

The notion of bringing my son along had come to me about two years previously. When I first conceived the notion of a trip around the world, to study dragons in all the places they might be found, Jake had been a mere toddler—far too young to accompany me. But such a expedition is not organized overnight, nor even in a single year. By the time I was certain the expedition would happen, let alone had prepared myself for it, Jake was already seven. Boys have gone to war at sea that young. Why should one not go in the name of science?

I had not forgotten the opprobrium I faced when I went to Eriga, leaving my son behind. It seemed to me that the clear solution to this problem was not to stay forever at home, but rather to bring him with me the next time. I saw it as a splendid educational opportunity for a boy of nine. Others, of course, saw it as more of my characteristic madness.

I excused myself to Miriam Farnswood and crossed the room to meet Abby. She said, “Natalie sent me to tell you—”

“Oh dear,” I sighed, before she could finish. A guilty look at the clock confirmed my suspicion. “It has gotten late, hasn’t it?”

Abby was kind enough not to belabor the point. The truth was, I did not want to show my guests to the door. This was to be our last gathering before I left—or rather I should say my last gathering, since Natalie would continue to host them in my absence. As much as the upcoming voyage excited me, I would miss these evenings, where I could expand my mind and test its strengths against people whose intelligence dwarfed mine. Thanks to them, my understanding of the world had grown far beyond its early, naive beginnings. And I, for my part, had done what I could to share my knowledge in return, especially with those individuals, male or female, whose opportunities had not been as great as mine.

I write in the past tense now; I caught myself thinking in the past tense then, and shook myself. I was going on a voyage, not relocating to the other side of the world forever. What had started in my sitting room was not ending tonight. My part in it was merely pausing.

They went without a fuss, though with a great many good wishes for safe travels and great discoveries. The farewells took more than a half hour in all. The last to depart was Tom Wilker, who had no need to say farewell; we would be going on the voyage together, for I could not imagine trying to conduct research without his assistance.

“Did I overhear you promising specimens to Mrs. Farnswood?” he asked, when it was just him, myself, and Natalie in the foyer.

“Yes, of birds,” I said. “She will pay for them, or sell those she does not wish to keep for herself. It will be another source of funds, and a welcome one.”

He nodded, though his smile was rueful. “I don’t know when we’ll find the time to sleep. Or rather, when you will find the time. I’m not the one who has promised regular reports to the Winfield Courier.”

“I will sleep at night,” I said, very reasonably. “Writing by lamplight is a terrible waste of oil, and there are not so many species of nocturnal birds as to keep me busy every night.”

It got a laugh from him, as I had intended. “Sleep well, Isabella. You’ll need your rest.”

Natalie came out into the hall in time to bid him goodnight. When the door was shut behind him, she turned to face me. “Are you very tired, or can you spare a few moments?”

I was far too awake to sleep just yet, and would only read if I tried to go to bed. “Does it have to do with the arrangements for my absence?”

Natalie shook her head. We had been over those matters enough times already: my will, in case I should die; the transfer of my townhouse to her temporary stewardship; how to contact me once I was abroad; all the logistical hedges that must be leapt before I could depart. She said, “I spoke with Mr. Kemble again today.”

I sighed. “Come to my study. I shall want to sit for this, I think.”

My worn old chair was some comfort to me while pondering a topic that was not comfortable at all. Once ensconced in its embrace, I said to Natalie, “He wants me to make a deal with the Thiessois.”

“He is at a standstill,” Natalie said. “He has been for more than a year. The fine structure of dragonbone continues to elude him, and so long as it does, you do not have synthesis. M. Suderac’s aeration process may be what we need.”

The mere mention of this topic made me want to beat my head against my desk. Only the knowledge that Frederick Kemble had been beating his head against something far less yielding for nearly a decade now restrained me. Tom and I had hired him to create a synthetic replacement for preserved dragonbone, so that human society might enjoy the benefits of that substance without having to slaughter dragons to obtain it. Kemble had re-created its chemical composition, but the airy lattice of its structure, which reduced the already-slight weight without sacrificing strength, had proven less tractable.

Natalie was correct: the aeration process devised by M. Suderac might indeed help. I, however, could not abide the man—to the point where the mere thought of partnering with him for such a venture made me ill. He was a handsome Thiessois fellow, and clearly thought his good looks ought to earn him more than mere friendliness from me. After all, I was a widow, and if not as young as I had once been, I had not gathered so very much dust on the shelf yet. It was not marriage M. Suderac wanted from me; he had a wife, and even if he did not, I offered very little in the way of property to tempt him. He merely wanted unfettered access to my person. To say that I was disinclined to grant it to him is a howling understatement.

And yet, if financial partnership would save the lives of countless dragons…

The secret of preserving dragonbone was out in the world. That particular cat had escaped its bag before I went to Eriga, when thieves employed by the Marquess of Canlan broke into Kemble’s laboratory and stole his notes, and Canlan subsequently sold them to a Yelangese company, the Va Ren Shipping Association. The fellows there seemed to have kept a relatively tight lid on their information, for it had not become common knowledge yet, but I knew it was spreading. Which meant the need for a synthetic substitute was urgent.

I weighed these factors, until my heart sat like lead in my chest. “I do not trust him,” I said at last to Natalie. “I cannot. He is the sort of man who sees a thing and wants it, and thinks that alone entitles him to have it. I truly would not put it past him to crack the problem at last, but then keep the results for his own profit. And while I might forego my own stake if it meant having the answer, I cannot allow Kemble and the others to be robbed in such fashion.”

Natalie dropped her head against the back of the chair, staring in resignation at the ceiling. “Well, I tried. You are not wrong about Suderac, I think—but I do not know how else we will make it happen.”

“Perhaps I should try hiring thieves. They could break in and steal the secrets of the aeration process.”

“Thank God you’re about to get on board a ship,” Natalie said. “Otherwise, I think you might honestly follow through.”

She exaggerated—but not by much. For the sake of dragons, there was very little I would not do.

The next morning’s post brought a number of letters, some of them from people who had not noticed that I was about to be gone from home for an extended period of time and would not have much chance to answer them. One, however, caught my eye.

The handwriting on the outside of the envelope was unfamiliar to me. It was not merely that I did not recognize the hand; the entire style of it was strange, as if written by a foreigner. And yet it reminded me of something, but I could not say what.

Curious, I slit the flap with my knife. The note inside was written on excellent paper, again in that strange hand. It was an invitation to join one Wademi n Oforiro Dara for lunch at the Salburn that day, if I was not already engaged.

Now I knew what the handwriting had evoked. I was still in occasional contact with Galinke n Oforiro Dara, the half-sister of the oba of Bayembe. This man’s script showed traces of the same style, though in his case much fainter. From this I deduced that he was more accustomed to writing in Scirling than Galinke was.

Oforiro Dara. He was of the same lineage as Galinke. A brother? No, I was fairly certain she had no brothers born to the same mother, and the Yembe inherit their lineage names through the maternal line. He might be anything from Galinke’s mother’s sister’s son to a far more distant cousin than that. But the connection was enough to make me dash off a quick acceptance and send it to the man’s hotel. My alternative plans for lunch involved a quick meal gulped down while packing; this promised to be far more interesting.

In those days, I did not often dine at the Salburn—which is my polite way of saying that I could not really afford it. I minded very little; I have never been a gourmand. But it meant that Wademi n Oforiro Dara was either a wealthy man or well-funded by someone else, as lunch for two there was not a thing to undertake lightly.

I had no difficulty spotting him in the lobby. He was Yembe and dark, and dressed after their fashion in a wrapped and folded cloth, though he made concession to Scirland’s cooler climate and stricter sense of propriety with a mantle over his upper body. The coloration was almost Scirling-sober, too: black and gold in a simple geometric pattern. He was already on his feet when I entered, and approached me immediately.

We exchanged Yembe greetings, which served to show me just how badly my accent and grammar had deteriorated. When he shifted to my native tongue, I apologized to him for it. “I’m afraid my command of Yembe has atrophied terribly for lack of use—and it was not good to begin with. Galinke and I correspond in Scirling.”

His own Scirling was accented but fluent. “You should come for a visit! I hear that you are about to set off on a journey. Will you be stopping in Bayembe?”

“Would that I could go everywhere,” I said. “But I’m afraid that my research requires me to expand my knowledge in breadth, rather than depth. I must devote my time to new areas and new species.”

This was true, but not the entire story. I could not tell this man about my conversation with a certain member of the Synedrion (who shall remain nameless, though he is dead now and cannot be harmed by the gossip), wherein he made it clear to me that the government would not look kindly on my ever returning to Bayembe. What precisely they feared, I cannot say; I only ever knew the one state secret about our affairs there, and it was long since out of the bag. But having thus erred once, I could not be trusted not to err again.

To my surprise, Wademi and I did not dine in the main room. He had acquired one of the private rooms for us—perhaps because that way we attracted less attention, the Yembe man and the woman once accused of betraying her country for his. The mystery of how he could afford such a thing was soon cleared up, for it transpired that he was indeed the son of Galinke’s mother’s sister. Anyone so closely linked with the oba of Bayembe, even through a lesser wife, could easily purchase me and my entire household without so much as a blink.

We passed the starter course with pleasantries, but after the main course arrived, I discovered that he had another reason for arranging this private room.

“What have you heard of the dragons?” he asked, once the waiter was gone.

“The dragons?” I echoed. My mind was so full of various draconic species that it took me longer than it should have to see his meaning. “Do you mean the ones the Moulish have given to Bayembe?”

It was not that I had forgotten them. One does not easily forget about deals one has helped broker between two foreign peoples, especially when that assistance has caused one to be accused of treason. But my interest in dragons was biological, not political; the fact that there were now Moulish swamp-wyrms in Bayembe rivers was not at the forefront of my thoughts.

Wademi nodded, and I spread my hands. “I have heard very little, really. Galinke mentioned that the eggs had been brought as promised, and then had hatched—I believe she said the total was somewhat poor, though. There were arrangements to make sure the fangfish were sufficiently fed. But nothing since then.” Which, now that I thought of it, was peculiar. Granted, the dragons in the rivers of Bayembe were intended as a defense for that country’s border, and as such might be a protected secret. But Galinke would know very well that I wanted to hear more of their progress, and could have found some way to tell me something. Instead, her infrequent letters had diverted me with other matters.

It seemed that she had indeed found a way to tell me something, and his name was Wademi n Oforiro Dara. “The situation has become… odd,” he said, “and we are hoping you can make sense of it.”

He spoke slowly, in between bites of his food. I reminded myself to eat my own, though I fear the best efforts of the Salburn chefs were entirely wasted on me that day.

Wademi said, “At first it was the eggs, which did not hatch in the quantities hoped. But the Moulish brought more the next year, so we have enough now. The fangfish ate one another, and those who survived grew—some of them. Many were runts. But even those which grew are not like the dragons in the swamp. They are more slender.”

“Juveniles,” I said. “Have you asked the Moulish? They would know how long it takes to reach full maturation.”

He shook his head. “They should be fully grown now. And their hide is different; their scales are more fine.”

I could not stop myself from asking, “Are you certain it is not a skin condition?”

By way of reply, he reached beneath his mantle and brought out a small box, which he laid on the table between us. When I opened it, a strong smell of formaldehyde marred the air. The box contained a scrap of skin, which I pinched gently between my fingernails and lifted for a better view.

It was not a skin condition. I had often observed the rough, crocodilian hides of swamp-wyrms, and while they were vulnerable to disease, what illness would refine their integument? What I held in my hand was more like the skin of a fish.

Or a savannah snake. “They cannot have bred with the dragons of Bayembe,” I said. Although some of that species ventured into the fringes of the Moulish jungle, they did not go far enough in to encounter swamp-wyrms. And even if they did—and succeeded in producing viable eggs—the Moulish would not have given those eggs to the oba. They had a very rigorous process for breeding their dragons, which involved taking the males of the swamp proper to the lake where the queens swam.

My fingernails pinched tighter on the skin. The queens…

I had not learned as much about swamp-wyrm biology as I would have liked. I knew that the Moulish took the eggs after their laying and distributed them about the swamp, and I knew that the different incubation of the eggs encouraged some to develop into queens, while the rest remained male. (At the time I suspected, but had not had a chance to prove, that some of the “males” were either neuter or infertile females. Neuter sex was known in other draconic types, and I had a sense that only some of the wyrms in the swamp were eligible to breed with the queens. But I had not gotten to examine enough dragons at sufficiently close range to be certain.)

My head was awhirl with these thoughts and others, various theories and observations colliding in untidy ways. What emerged from the scrum was this: what if the transplantation of the eggs to the rivers of Bayembe had produced queens instead of males?

My observations of the queen dragons had all been at quite a distance, so I was only speculating that their hides featured such fine, overlapping scales. It made sense, though. They swam in the turbulent waters of the lake below the Great Cataract, where they would benefit from a more streamlined surface.

But if that were the case, why had the Moulish not said anything to the Yembe?

Because they did not want the existence of the queens known. The oba would certainly try to trade for one, and if that failed, he might well try to take one by stealth or force. Or, if he learned enough of the incubation procedures, try to mimic them so that he might breed his own dragons, without needing to rely on the Moulish.

Which left me in rather a pickle. If my theory could be correct, then I desperately wanted confirmation. Moreover, Wademi—and through him, Galinke and all her people, half-brother included— were looking to me for aid. But it would not very well repay my Moulish friends if I spilled a secret they were trying to keep.

I laid the skin back in its box. “I am not certain what to say. It may be a response to the cleaner, fresher environment of the rivers; swamp water is very full of silt and organic matter, which I imagine is quite an irritant to the skin of the young dragons.” Certainly it had been an irritant to my own hide. “Do your dragons seem healthy?”

“For the most part,” Wademi said.

“I should like to know if they keep growing,” I said. “Some fishes change size according to their environment; it is possible that your dragons will grow larger than those in the swamp, because of the more open waters.” If they grew to more than four meters in length, that would tell me a great deal. The queens, from what I had seen of them, were much larger than the males.

Wademi made the humming noise that, among the Yembe, stood in for the refusal it would be rude to state directly. I thought about our private room, and Galinke’s reticence in her letters. He had invited me to lunch so as to convey information they did not want committed to paper. (It did not occur to me until some months later that someone in Scirland might even be reading my mail. If they did not want me going to Bayembe, they might have an interest in the letters I sent to and received from there. To this day, I do not know if it was so.)

My thoughts were not on such matters that day, but even then I knew it might be difficult to keep me informed. I sighed, saying, “It will be difficult to write to me regardless, as I shall be rather peripatetic for a while.”

“But what of the dragons?”

Even had I possessed the courage to defy that unnamed gentleman of the Synedrion, I could not change our itinerary now. Although there was room for diversion in it—as this account will demonstrate—we could not divert all the way to Bayembe, just so I could look in on the dragons in the rivers. “I’m afraid there is very little I can do from where I am, sir. If they are healthy, then surely that is enough.”

He looked dissatisfied. Had I given the Yembe such a high opinion of my knowledge that they believed I could resolve this question over lunch in a distant country? Or had they expected me to come to their aid in person? If so, it pained me to disappoint them. But there was nothing for it: too many things prevented me from going.

As a sop to Wademi, I said, “I anticipate a great expansion in my knowledge of dragons, thanks to this expedition. It is possible I will learn something of use to you.”

Which, as it happened, was true—albeit in a roundabout way. But that was no comfort to him at the time, and so we both left our meeting in less than good spirits.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2015/02/23/voyage-of-the-basilisk-excerpt-marie-brennan/feed/5Daughter of Necessityhttps://www.tor.com/2014/10/01/daughter-of-necessity-marie-brennan/
https://www.tor.com/2014/10/01/daughter-of-necessity-marie-brennan/#commentsWed, 01 Oct 2014 13:00:00 +0000http://www.tor.com/2014/10/01/daughter-of-necessity-marie-brennan/By day she crafts; by night she unmakes. Surely somewhere, in all the myriad crossings of the threads, there is a future in which all will be well. Marie Brennan offers an intriguing new spin on a classic tale.]]>

By day she crafts; by night she unmakes. Surely somewhere, in all the myriad crossings of the threads, there is a future in which all will be well. Marie Brennan offers an intriguing new spin on a classic tale.

This short story was acquired and edited for Tor.com by editor Paul Stevens.

The strands thrum faintly beneath her fingertips, like the strings of a lyre. Plain grey wool, held taut by the stone weights tied at the ends, awaiting her hand. She can feel the potential in the threads, the resonance. She has that much of the gift, at least.

But it is madness to think she can do more. It is hubris.

It is desperation.

Her maid stands ready with the bone pick. She takes it up, slides its point beneath the first thread, and begins to weave.

Antinoös will be the most easily provoked. He has no care for the obligations of a guest, the courtesy due to his host; he sees only the pleasures to be had in food and drink. If these are restricted, marred—the meat burnt, the wine thin, the grapes too soon consumed—then he will complain. And it will take but one poorly phrased reassurance for his complaint to become more than mere words.

The guards will know to watch for this. When Antinoös draws his knife, they will be ready. Others will come to Antinoös’ aid, of course; the tables will be knocked aside, the feast trampled underfoot, the rich treasures of the hall smashed to pieces.

Antinoös will not be the first to die, though. That will be Peisandros, who will fall with a guard’s sword through his heart. After him, Klymenos, and then Pseras of the guards; then it will be a dozen, two score, three hundred and more dead, blood in a torrent, flames licking at the palace walls, smoke and death and devastation.

She drops the shuttle, shaking with horror. No, no. That was not how she meant it to go.

“My lady?” the maid asks, uncertain.

She almost takes up scissors and cuts her error away. Some fragment of wisdom stops her: that is not her gift, and to try must surely end in disaster. Instead she retrieves the shuttle, sends it back through without changing the shed. Unweaving the line that had been. “The pick,” she commands, and her maid gives it to her in silent confusion. With a careful hand she lifts the warp threads, passes the shuttle through, reversing her movements from before. Undoing the work of hours with hours more, while her maid helps without understanding.

I must weave a funeral shroud, she had told them. She’d intended it to be for them. Not for all her city.

But the power was there: within her grasp, beyond her control.

She retires for the night, trembling, exhausted. Frightened. And exhilarated. When morning comes, all is as it was before, her problems unchanged, her desperation the same. Gathering her courage, she goes back to the loom.

Surely control may be learned.

After so many years enjoying the hospitality of the palace, the men will not be easily persuaded to leave. Frustration and failure will not do it; if those were sufficient, they would have departed long since. They stay on in perpetual hope of success, and will not leave until they believe that hope gone.

She will choose her tool with care. Eurymachos is renowned for his silver tongue; he will bend it to her chosen end. A dropped hint here, a frank conversation over too much wine there. Why should a man stay, when he believes another has claimed the place he intended to take? An elegant man, well dressed and better spoken than his rivals—and they will see the proof of it, when she bestows smiles upon him she denies to all others. For him, she will drape herself in rich cloth, adorn her ears and neck with gold. For him, she will play the coquette.

One by one, they will go. Grumbling, disappointed, a few vowing some revenge against Eurymachos for having stolen the place they thought to claim. But they will go, without a fight. Their numbers will dwindle: one hundred and eight, four score, two score, twelve. They will leave, and with each chamber emptied she will breathe more easily.

Until only one remains. Smiling, smooth spoken Eurymachos, to whom she has shown much favor. He will not leave. For has she not made a promise to him, in the absence of her husband, whom all presume dead?

Too late, she will see that it has gone too far. He has coaxed from her words she never meant to speak, implications she cannot disavow. To do so would bring war, and the destruction she sought to avoid. She will have no choice but to acquiesce, for the sake of her people, for the sake of her son.

She will fail, and pay the price of that failure until the end of her days.

This time she is shaking with rage. To be so manipulated, so trapped . . . she would die before she allowed that to happen.

Or would she? After all, the future now hanging on the loom is her own creation. However undesirable, it is possible. She could not have woven it, were it not so.

Her maid waits at her shoulder. They have long since begun to tell tales, she knows, her maidservants whispering of their mistress’ odd behavior. They think it only a tactic for delay, an excuse for avoiding the men. That, they whisper, is why she undoes her work each night, reclaiming her spent thread, only to start anew in the morning.

As reasons go, it is a good one. They need not know the rest of her purpose. If any hint of that reached the men, all hope of her freedom would be gone.

Night after night, fate after fate. She can only keep trying. Surely somewhere, in all the myriad crossings of the threads, there is a future in which all will be well.

Her son will ask again for stories of his father, and she will tell him what she knows. That the king was summoned to war, and he went; that many who sailed to the east never returned.

This time, Telemachos will not be content with the familiar tale. He will insist on hearing more. When she cannot satisfy him, he will declare his intent to go in search of the truth.

It will wrench her heart to let him go. The seas took one man from her already; will they take this one as well, this youth she remembers as a babe at her breast? But release him she will, because perhaps he will find what she cannot: an escape from this trap, for himself, for her, for them all.

He will board the ship and go to Pylos, to Sparta, and in the halls of a king he will indeed hear the tale. Full of joy, he will set sail for home—but on the beaches of Ithaka, he will find a different welcome.

Antinoös, Ktesippos, Elatos, and others besides. Armed and armored, prepared not for war, but for murder. There on the beaches they will cut her son down, and his blood will flower like anemone in the sand.

When the news reaches her, it will break her heart. She will fling herself from the walls of Ithaka, and her sole victory will be that none among her suitors will ever claim her.

She wants to weep, seeing what she has woven. The threads fight her, their orderly arrangement belying their potential for chaos. Each thread is a life, and each life is a thousand thousand choices; she is not goddess enough to control them. Only a woman, a mortal woman, with a trace of the divine in her veins. And a trace is not enough.

It has become far too familiar, this unweaving. Forward and back make little difference to the speed and surety of her hands. Melantho gathers up the loose thread silently, winds it back onto the shuttle, but her mistress does not miss the sullen look in the girl’s eyes. This is one who has made her life pleasant by giving herself to the men. She does not like being a maidservant, even to a queen.

A queen who can trace her ancestry back through her grandmother’s grandmother to the three daughters of Necessity. From them she inherits this fragment of their gift, to spin thread and link it to men, to weave the shape of their fates on her loom. If she continues her efforts . . .

But she has no chance to try again. When she goes to that high chamber the next morning, Leodes is there, and the frame is bare of threads. He knows what she has been doing; they all know, for Melantho has told them. Leodes has always been more tolerable than the others, for he is their priest, and alone among them he respects the obligations of a guest. He chides her now for her dishonesty, though, for lying to them all this time about the progress of her weaving. There will be no more thread for her, no days and nights spent safe in this room, trying to weave a path away from danger.

He leaves her there with the empty frame and empty hands. She is not without choices: she has woven a hundred of them, a thousand, a new one every day. But every one ends in disaster. She will not choose disaster.

In fury she takes up her scissors. There are no threads here for her to cut; she sets the blades instead to her hair. When she wed she cut a single lock in sacrifice; now she cuts them all. She kindles a fire in a bronze dish and gives her hair to the flames, an offering to the powers from whom she descends. If she cannot weave a good fate with her own hands, then she will pray for those powers to have pity upon her instead.

The flames rise high, dancing twisting flickering tongues, weaving about one another in ephemeral knots. In their light, she sees her answer, and she thrusts her hands into the fire.

When she withdraws them, threads of gold follow.

She casts them quickly into the air, the steady lines of the warp, the glowing bundle of the weft. There, without loom, without doubt, she begins to weave the fate of one man.

He is on the island of Kalypso, prisoner and guest. The nymph sings as she walks to and fro across her loom, weaving with a shuttle of gold. But Kalypso is no kin to the Fates. Her pattern will falter, give way to a power stronger than her own.

The gods themselves will order his release. One will try to drown him at sea, but he will come safe to the island of the Phaiakians. There he will find hospitality and tales of the war in years past, and one—the tale of his most clever stratagem—will provoke him to admit his true name.

He will tell them his tale, the long years since that war, and out of respect they will aid him in his final journey. In the house of the swineherd Eumaios his son will find him: Telemachos, evading the trap Antinoös has laid. Together they will devise a new strategem. The king will return to his palace as a beggar, to be ridiculed and mocked by the men who have impoverished his house for so long.

And she . . .

She will put a challenge before her suitors, to string and shoot her husband’s bow. One after another they will try and fail, until the filthy old beggar does what they cannot. And then he will turn his bow upon them, until every man among them lies dead.

Odysseus, king of Ithaka, will come home at last.

The tapestry hangs in the air before her, a perfect creation, glowing with fire and hope.

In the darkness beyond, her half-blinded eyes discern a silhouette. A woman, helmed and regal, who studies her work with a critical eye.

Her own gaze follows, and she sees the flaw. The error which, perhaps, underlays all others, turning her every bid for victory into failure. And she knows how it must be mended.

It is not easy to cast the final row. To cloud her own mind, robbing herself of this memory, the knowledge that she has woven Odysseus’ fate and through him, the fate of them all. But she must. If she knows what is to come, she will ruin it; she will betray the truth through a careless word or a too cautious act. There is a reason this gift is a thing of gods and not mortals.

The thread settles into place, binding her own fate. She will see her husband and not know him; recognition will not come until he proves himself to her again.

Her weaving is done. She kneels before the grey-eyed goddess and bows her head, accepting the ignorance that wisdom bestows. The brilliant light of her creation flares and then fades away.

Her maids find her collapsed on the floor and hurry her off to bed. These are the ones whose threads will continue; they have kept faith with their queen, and so they will not be hanged with treacherous Melantho and her sisters. But all of that lies in a future they have not seen. Neither maids nor mistress knows what she has done.

She sleeps a day and a night, and when she rises, her hair is as long as it ever was. She goes about her duties in a daze, which her maids attribute to the absence of her son. Their reasoning is borne out when Telemachos returns, for then it seems that she wakes at last from her dream.

She goes to the head of the hall, looking out over her suitors, the men who have clamored for her hand, believing her to be the means by which they will shape their own fates.

The old beggar stands disregarded at the back of the hall. In this moment, every eye is upon her.

Penelope holds the mighty bow in her hand and speaks for all to hear. “My husband will be the man who can string the bow of Odysseus, and fire an arrow through twelve axe-heads. Thus the Fates have decreed, and on my word, it shall be so.”

]]>https://www.tor.com/2014/10/01/daughter-of-necessity-marie-brennan/feed/16A Breathtaking Duel in Dorothy Dunnett’s The Game of Kingshttps://www.tor.com/2014/02/27/a-breathtaking-duel-in-dorothy-dunnetts-the-game-of-kings/
https://www.tor.com/2014/02/27/a-breathtaking-duel-in-dorothy-dunnetts-the-game-of-kings/#commentsThu, 27 Feb 2014 19:00:00 +0000http://www.tor.com/2014/02/27/a-breathtaking-duel-in-dorothy-dunnetts-the-game-of-kings/Dorothy Dunnett is the only author on the face of the planet who has ever made me feel abjectly inferior as a writer. Most great authors, when I read their stuff, I find myself inspired and energized and eager to tell my own stories. Dunnett? I’m not sure I’ll ever write anything that lives up […]]]>

Dorothy Dunnett is the only author on the face of the planet who has ever made me feel abjectly inferior as a writer. Most great authors, when I read their stuff, I find myself inspired and energized and eager to tell my own stories. Dunnett? I’m not sure I’ll ever write anything that lives up to her best moments.

The worst part is, one of the most amazing scenes I think she ever wrote was in her first. bloody. novel.

It’s a work of historical fiction set in sixteenth-century Scotland called The Game of Kings(not to be confused with George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones), and contains what is quite possibly the best duel I have ever read or ever will read in my entire life. I love a good fight scene; I’ve studied fencing and karate and I did stage combat choreography in college, so I’ve put a lot of thought into this topic. When I read the duel at Flaw Valleys, it made my brain spin around like a top. Even though the scene goes straight into a chase with equally high tension and stakes, I had to put the book down and wander around my apartment in a daze for a few minutes, marveling at what I had just read.

What makes it so good? Everything. When I taught my creative writing students how to do fight scenes, I used Dunnett as a model, and discovered that every single trick I could think of, every component that makes combat in fiction interesting and vivid and tense, was in that scene. The stakes, the physical environment, just enough technical detail without being too much. The emotions. Dialogue. Changing beats. Point of view. The fight is inextricably woven into the fabric of the story; it isn’t a mere spectacle, or cheap way to simplify a conflict. Quite the contrary: what makes it so agonizingly intense is that it brings opposing forces to bear in a way that seems to have no good resolution at all. In fact, the only criticism I can make of it is that Dunnett says it lasts for about twenty minutes, which I don’t think is plausible. Apart from that, however, it’s sheer unadulterated brilliance.

And it was her first novel. Life is just not fair. But at least we all get to enjoy the result.

Marie Brennan is a former academic with a background in archaeology, anthropology, and folklore, which she now puts to rather cockeyed use in writing fantasy. Her second Lady Trent memoir, The Tropic of Serpents, is available March 4th from Tor Books.

This original short story was acquired and edited for Tor.com by editor Paul Stevens.

Peter found her slippers just inside his office door. Standard white hospital issue, placed with exquisite care in the small gap between the bookcase and the doorframe, perfectly aligned, heels against the wall.

The police officer just shrugged at Peter’s questioning glance. The man was standing a few feet inside the office, thumbs in his belt and elbows tucked against his body, failing to hide his discomfort. He went out quickly when Peter nodded, to take up station in the hall.

The humming stopped when he drew near, before Peter could identify the tune. He said in a friendly voice, “I found your slippers by the door. Aren’t your feet cold, without shoes?”

From beneath his desk came a cockney accent, rough but not hostile. “’Ave to take care of them. Not wear them out. Got a long way to go yet, lovey.”

“I see. Where are you headed?” No answer; he hadn’t expected one. Peter stepped back to a simpler tactic. “Why are you under my desk?”

He could see her bare feet through the gap where the modesty panel didn’t quite reach the floor. Hard feet, armored with calluses, and profoundly filthy. The nurses hadn’t wanted to bathe her. Hadn’t wanted to spend any more time with her than necessary. Downtown hospital, veteran staff that had seen absolutely everything three times over, and they didn’t want to be in the same room as this woman.

After a long enough pause to establish that the patient wasn’t going to answer that question, either, Peter tried a third time. “Is there something I can call you?”

“Been called a lot of things, duck. Mad, Maud, Mad Maudlin.”

Maudlin. He couldn’t tell if she meant it as an adjective—a play on her name—or a name in its own right, the English variant of Magdalene. Or perhaps she was just playing with sounds. But at least he’d gotten an answer, which was more than the nurses had managed. She mostly just swore at them, called them whores. “May I call you Maud?”

Silence, that somehow carried the quality of a shrug.

“My name is Peter, Maud. I’d like to talk to you. It would be easier if I could see you, though. I don’t suppose you might be willing to help? Maybe come sit in a chair, so we can talk?”

Another pause, this one considering. He’d never met someone so able to express herself through a desk. Just as he began pondering his next move, knees dragged against carpet and the feet disappeared. And Maud stood up.

He barely stopped the Jesus that wanted to burst from his mouth. Tangled, matted hair, hanging in stringy ropes, its original color impossible to tell. Pointed, thrusting chin, bearing a slash-thin mouth. Strong arch of a nose, and on either side of it, two eyes that could have driven nails into a concrete wall.

Mad Maudlin grinned at him, revealing a disastrous set of teeth. Never taking her eyes off Peter, she rounded the desk, walking on the toes of her filthy feet, and took one of the two chairs.

No wonder the nurses avoid her.

He’d been on the psychiatric ward of this hospital for eleven years, practicing psychology longer than that. He’d seen a lot of homeless people, many of them mentally ill or implicated in a violent crime. But nobody like this woman.

Peter swallowed, even though he knew she’d spot that sign of weakness. There was no reason to be afraid. The police had taken the weapons she’d carried into the emergency room. Her hands might be skin over tendon and bone, strong as iron, but both the officer and an orderly were just outside, watching through the window in the door; one threatening move—even a hint of a threat—and she would be sedated, bundled into restraints, and dealt with more cautiously. But she hadn’t offered violence to anyone.

Not since admission, anyway. The question was whether she’d done so beforehand. And whether Peter could find any hint of where this woman had come from. Mad Maudlin.

He pushed the name away. Delusional behavior, the nurses said; well, he wouldn’t help that by calling her “mad.” Or overly sentimental, for that matter. Not that she looked sentimental in the least. Peter swallowed again. Not since his first encounter with a violent psychotic had he felt so unsafe in his own office. No, not unsafe—out of control. Whether Maud attacked him or not, the simple act of standing up from beneath his desk had somehow put the reins of this encounter into her hands.

So take them back. “Thank you, Maud,” he said. “Would you like some water?”

She nodded. He filled a paper cup from the cooler next to his desk, then pushed it across to her, refusing to let himself retreat in a hurry when that was done. Instead he took the other seat. “If you’re hungry, I can get you some food, too.”

“Not ’ungry.”

She’d come in at seven fifteen; it was now a little after ten. “Did you have breakfast, Maud?” A wobble of her head that looked affirmative. “What did you eat?”

“Souls.”

He’d expected that. Not the specific answer, but something in that vein; the transfer orders from the emergency room cited her incoherent and frightening speech. Schizophrenia likely. “Where was that, Maud?”

Again she displayed those appalling teeth. They lay at all angles in her gums, and some had broken off. If they hurt, she gave no sign. In a dreadful accent he thought was supposed to be southern, she said, “The Good Lord don’t keep his kitchens in the attic.”

Hell, then. Delusions show a religious sensibility, Peter noted. Then underlined it mentally when Maud went on, “Down by the fires, and a big cauldron over them, with all the whores inside. But fire don’t bother me. I drank a toast of them, the boiled bitches.” She spat on the carpet. “Don’t like whores. They wants my Tom, and shan’t get ’im.”

The name caught Peter’s ear. “Who is Tom?”

Maud’s attention was on the cup in her hand. “Shouldn’t drink this,” she mused, holding it up so the morning sunlight glowed through the thin paper. “I’m quarrelsome when I’m drunk. Saltwater does that to me, salt and gall, bitter, bitter. Like betrayal.”

“I’d like to hear about Tom,” Peter said, wondering if this was a clue. The clothes on her when she stumbled into the ER had someone’s blood on them—a prostitute’s? Or Tom’s? No alcohol in her system, but she said she was quarrelsome, and if she believed herself drunk it could be almost as bad as the real thing.

She frowned and twisted a quarter-turn away, presenting her right shoulder. “Not much good to be sorry for it now. ’Ow long ’as it been? Ten thousand years? Or ten thousand miles. I confuse the two, I know it. Come such a long way, and ’ave so much farther to go.”

“Can we talk about Tom, Maud?”

Paper crumpled in her grip, the remaining water sloshing out to soak the carpet. Droplets fell from her trembling fist, and her gaze struck Peter like a spear, freezing the cry in his throat. For a few breathless beats, he thought she would attack him.

Then Maud’s lips twisted in pain, and she looked away.

When he could breathe again, Peter thought, Paranoid schizophrenia. He relaxed his stiff hands, signaled “all’s well” to the orderly watching through the window, and said, “Maud, I’m not sure how much you understand of what’s happened, so let me explain a few things. You came into the emergency room this morning, hallucinating and covered in blood. We’re concerned that someone may have been hurt, and that you might be able to tell us who.” Even if Maud confessed to a crime, he couldn’t share that with the police, unless she gave him permission—not likely. But she might let him point them to the victim. Or at least give him something that could lead him to her family, or someone else who knew her. “In return, I’d like to help you. I’m a doctor, you see.”

With a bitter laugh, Maud dropped the ruined cup and held her wrists out to Peter, still not looking at him. “Chains and whips. I knows the song. You’ll cage me and starve me, three times fifteen years, but I’ll not die before Doomsday.”

His heart gave an unpleasant jolt. Prior hospitalizations? Entirely possible; schizophrenics often cycled in and out of treatment. There was no curing them, only drugging them into a semblance of normalcy. And that left them very vulnerable to abuse. Had she been mistreated at another facility, or was this simply more paranoid delusion? “No one’s going to hurt you,” Peter promised. “There are medicines that doctors sometimes use, in cases like this—do you know if anyone has ever given you olanzapine? Or aripiprazole?” No answer. Maybe the hypothetical other doctors had discovered what the ER had, that none of the usual antipsychotics made a dent in this woman’s behavior. “I’d like to help you, but that’s hard when I don’t know your medical history. I’m hoping we can just talk. You can tell me what you know, however much you like. Does that sound okay?”

One eye appeared, staring at him through the ragged curtain of her hair. Then the hair moved, and Peter realized it was a nod. He added, “We don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to.”

Maud still hunched sideways in the chair, curled around herself, weight on her left hip. Not encouraging. He searched for a question specific enough to be useful, neutral enough not to upset her. “I noticed your accent sounds like it’s from London, Maud. Do you remember when you came to the States? It must have been a long trip.”

Maud scoffed at him. Still behind the concealing hair, but her posture relaxed, feet touching the carpet once more. “Long? That’s nothing. I can do it in my sleep. Fifteen thousand miles in a night, one time, guided by the sun.” She paused to consider her math, counting on her fingers. “Ten thousand, fifteen thousand—but if it takes only a night walking, then does it count as so much?”

“I would say it does,” Peter said. “An airplane goes fast, but it still goes the whole distance. Did you fly here, Maud? Do you remember when that was?” If he could just get one solid detail, he might be able to figure out who she was, and from there have a better idea of what she’d been doing. The police had fingerprinted her while she was strapped to a bed in the ER, screaming profane rhymes at the nurses. But if that had turned up any results, no one had told Peter yet.

He shouldn’t have let speculation distract him. He almost missed her hesitant answer. “A long time ago,” she whispered, staring vacantly past the arm of Peter’s chair. “I used to say the conquest, but I don’t remember no more which one it was. People keep conquering places. Wars. The stars fight each other, but them’s afraid of me. And the moon . . .”

“The stars are afraid of the moon?”

She looked at Peter again, but this time the threat in her eyes wasn’t for him. “Of me,” she said, in a low, animal growl. “I’ll murder the bastard. Shake ’is dog till ’e howls, and the dragon and the crow will sing victory instead of dirges. I done it before.”

The reference to murder chilled Peter. “You’ve killed someone?”

“Drank ’is wine at St. Pancras.” She grinned, curving one hand as if it held something—a glass, maybe. “Claret, I think. Or ’ippocras? After I ’ad Tom back.”

Tom again. “How did you lose him?”

Maud got up, restlessly, pacing as if she were trapped in the cage she’d spoken of. “It ’appens every time. Over and over again. I don’t know ’ow old I am. Last time ’e woke me up—stripped off me clothes—my red-cheeked lad. I ’asn’t slept since then.”

She halted midpace, feet planted apart like an Egyptian statue, shoulders hunched. “Maud,” Peter said quietly, knowing it was a risk, “there was blood on your clothes when you came in. Not yours. Who did that come from? The moon? Or Tom?”

The ropes of hair swung, rhythmically, as she shook her head.

“What about the knife in your bag? And your staff? What were those for?”

The laugh was more of a kack-kack-kack sound. “Giants. Wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I cracks them over the ’ead and they falls. The knife ain’t for them, though. ’Ad to feed the fairies. Needed their ’elp. To take me when it’s time.”

“Feed them what?” Peter asked, not wanting the answer. Or rather, wanting it to have changed, from when the nurses asked.

“Mince pies,” Maud said. “They likes children, the fairies do.”

The faint smile on her face made him wish he’d never asked. It had happened to him once before, that a patient confessed to a crime; the ethical burden of silence had nearly driven Peter to despair. He still didn’t know what had become of that man. But the images still haunted Peter’s dreams, and now they would be joined by the bodies of children.

If there were bodies. Sometimes schizophrenics did violent things, obeying their delusions. Sometimes they just imagined they did them. Either way, it didn’t change Peter’s duty: he was a doctor, and he had to help Maud.

Most psychiatrists would pump her full of antipsychotics and stop there. Even if they found a drug that would work on her, though . . . Maud appeared to be homeless, and certainly lacked health insurance. Soon she’d run out, or forget to take the medication in the first place, and without any family to help her she’d cycle right back down into illness. It happens every time, she’d said. It would happen again. Peter had seen it before.

Unless she really had committed a crime, and they convicted her of it. Then they’d fill her with enough sedatives to put her down for a decade, and leave her to rot.

At least she would stay here tonight. The hospital could manage that much, even for patients like her. It wasn’t enough time, but it was all he could give her.

She was staring at him again, pale unblinking eyes. Their desperation cut him like a knife, when his mind was already full of thoughts about how the system was going to fail her. And then her words took him by surprise.

“You don’t ’ave to be afraid of me,” she said. Her voice held a softness, a resonance, that hadn’t been there before, turning the roughness into something much gentler. “All I wants is to find my Tom.”

It wasn’t the tone of a mother. The possibility that Tom was her son had crossed Peter’s mind, but this sounded more like a woman speaking of her lover. “The more you tell me about him,” Peter said, “the more I can do to help you find him.”

Maud shook her head, lips pressing together so hard they disappeared, leaving her mouth only a slash in her face. Tears lined her eyes, refusing to fall. “I don’t remember,” she whispered, the admission agonized. “My wits all went when ’e did.”

That statement stayed in Peter’s mind, caught like a fishhook, long after Maud was taken to her own locked room and Peter went on to other patients.

Microwaving his dinner that night, he played the recording of their session and let the fishhook pull him where it would. Stress could trigger schizophrenic episodes. Perhaps Tom had left her; perhaps more than once, a cycle of stability and disruption that was both cause and effect of her illness. He’d asked one of the nurses to call other psychiatric hospitals, asking if they’d ever had a patient fitting her description.

He realized he was humming that tune, the one she’d been crooning to herself when he came in, and again when they took her away. Peter grimaced and made himself stop. Tomorrow they’d have a list of missing persons in the area: children, men by the name of Tom, anyone who might be the source of that blood. The police were pushing for a fast analysis from the lab, but that could still take weeks; all they knew right now was that it hadn’t come from Mad Maudlin. He shouldn’t think of her by that name, he knew, but—

The “but” hung suspended in his mind, like the coyote in the cartoons. Just after he realizes the ground is gone, just before he falls.

Peter whispered, “Mad Maudlin.” And the tune, the one she’d been humming, resolved itself in his mind. Into one of the English folksongs his mother had loved so much.

The microwave pinged and went dark. Staring at its glossy surface, Peter sang,

“For to see mad Tom o’ Bedlam

Ten thousand miles I’ve traveled

Mad Maudlin goes on dirty toes

For to save her shoes from gravel.”

Bedlam. Bethlehem, the old lunatic asylum in London. And Magdalene societies—Maudlin—for degenerate women. Archetypal figures of lunacy . . . but “Tom” was so common a name, and Peter so determined to avoid thinking of his patient as “Mad Maudlin,” he’d missed the connection. Whether his patient’s name really was Maud or not, clearly she identified with the figure in the song.

Peter turned with sudden energy toward his CD collection, but stopped with a frustrated noise. Those songs had all been on LP; if they were anywhere now, it was in his sister’s basement. But there was the Internet, and a quick search produced a variety of lyrics, YouTube videos of Steeleye Span, Heather Alexander, more. Peter scribbled notes furiously, watched one video after another, scribbled some more. Mince pies—the man in the moon—Satan’s kitchen—

Tom o’ Bedlam. I now repent that ever / Poor Tom was so disdained, one version of the lyrics went. My wits are lost since him I crossed / Which makes me thus go chained.

He’d assumed Tom was a real person. What if that was just part of the delusion? It might explain why this song, why the identification with Mad Maudlin. Hell, it was almost Jungian in shape. Tom o’ Bedlam, a male figure—it suggested the animus, the masculine face of her psyche, estranged. Perhaps she’d rejected it for some reason—rape? Or some other trauma at male hands. And in the rejection, she’d broken her sense of self.

It didn’t match any of the usual etiologies for schizophrenia. But it could still be Maud’s own narrative, her attempt to craft her disorganized thinking into a coherent shape. And maybe he could use it to help her. She wanted to find Tom; well, if Peter was right, then Tom was within her. If Maud could be brought to see that . . .

Peter glanced at the microwave, saw it blinking “FOOD IS READY” at him. He opened and shut the door to get the clock back. 10:14 p.m. “I slept not since the conquest,” he mumbled, thinking. Everyone had to sleep sometimes, but—

Leaving his dinner cooling in the microwave, Peter grabbed a few things and headed for the door.

The nurse glanced at the security monitors and shook his head, blowing out a quick breath of laughter. “No, you won’t wake her. She’s been pacing all night. Hasn’t slept a wink.”

“Hang on a moment.” The new police officer dropped his feet from the desk and stood up, hooking one thumb through his belt. “This woman might be involved in a crime. And you want to take her for a walk? In the middle of the night?”

Peter faced him without flinching. “Yes, I do. And unless you’re ready to charge her with something and cart her off to jail, I don’t think you get to give me orders about how I deal with my patient.”

“Do you want to get killed?” the cop demanded—as if they’d left Maud anything resembling a weapon. “You’ve heard how she talks. Show a little common sense.”

“How she talks and how she acts aren’t the same thing. And common sense tells me to get her out of these surroundings. She’s almost certainly been hospitalized before, so this place is a source of anxiety for her. It might help to talk to her elsewhere.”

The cop barked a laugh. “Elsewhere! Nice of you to help the investigation. After we find your body in an alley, we’ll know who to arrest for it.”

Peter rolled his eyes in annoyance. “Where did you think I was taking her, McDonald’s? We’ll go to the rooftop garden. Only one door, and if you’re afraid she’ll escape by leaping off a twelve-story building, I’m sure the fences will stop her. Is that safe enough for you?”

The officer scowled. “I’ll come along. Just to be sure.”

If Peter had believed the officer’s aim was to protect him, he might have been more sympathetic. But the man was more likely to eavesdrop, then claim what he overheard wasn’t protected by doctor-client privilege. “You’ll wait by the door, out of earshot,” Peter said. “And if you argue, I’ll leave you here.”

The cop accepted it with bad grace. The nurse buzzed the door open for them. The clang of its shutting echoed through the dark, empty hallways; when that faded, Peter could hear the footsteps of an orderly making his rounds, the faint whimpering of a patient somewhere nearby. Yes, it would be better to get Maud out of here, even if it was only for a little while.

But she resisted when he told her where they were going. “She’ll see me,” Maud hissed, trying to twist free of his hand.

“Who? Who will see you?”

“The moon!” She glared upward as if she could see through all the intervening floors.

Eleven years working at a downtown hospital carved the lunar calendar into a man’s memory; full moons did indeed bring out the crazies. “It’s the new moon, Maud. It isn’t in the sky right now. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

Her arm stilled beneath his hand, then relaxed. This time when she pulled free, Peter let her, and she bent to take off her slippers again. With those in hand, she sailed down the hall as if she were a queen processing to court.

They went up the stairs to the garden, and the cop stayed by the door, at Peter’s insistence. The night air was warm and dry, the sound of traffic muted by distance and the late hour. Peter led Maud to a bench among the scrawny bushes, about halfway between the door and the roof’s fence-girded edge. Once they were seated, he pulled his MP3 player out of his pocket. “I have something I’d like you to listen to, Maud. A song. I think it might be familiar to you.”

She took the earphones from his hand, stared at them in confusion. Peter helped her tuck the buds into place. Then he hit play, and the faint, tinny sound of music graced the quiet air.

She sat unmoving through the whole song, ropy hair hiding her face. Peter watched her hand instead, wrapped around the slippers. The knuckles tightened twice, but he couldn’t hear well enough to know what lines sparked the reaction. He’d chosen the longest version he could find. Even at that, not everything she’d said was in it; Maud’s statements echoed verses Peter had only seen in obscure versions, recorded in eighteenth-century books. Either she’d done the same research he had, or she’d grown up in a household where those versions were sung.

When it ended, he let the silence stretch out for a little while, before prompting her quietly. “Maud?”

Her broken nails dug into the slippers. “By a knight of ghosts and shadows,” she sang in an undertone, “I summoned am to tourney.” She turned slightly to regard Peter, and her eyes gleamed bright through the hair.

“Have you heard this song before?”

“They been singing it for centuries, duck.” Maud yanked on the cord until the earbuds popped free, dangling from her fingers. “Add new verses every time I go ’round.”

“So the song describes what you feel?”

She laughed at him. “What I’ve done. I remembers enough to know that. It’s almost time.” Maud tilted her head back, hair falling away, and her profile was hard against the city glow behind.

“Time for what?”

Her teeth bared in a snarl that seemed equal parts eagerness and fear. “For tourney, love. Time to fight. Time to find Tom, and lose him, over and over. Because it don’t end; it just keeps ’appening, again and again.”

“It can end,” Peter said. He struggled to keep his voice soothing, not to let his sudden intense excitement break through. “That’s what I’m here for, Maud. You’re the only one who can make that happen, put an end to the cycle—but you don’t have to do it alone.”

She sat perfectly still, slippers forgotten in her hand. Then she turned her head, and her gaze struck him with all the force of that first encounter, when she stood up from beneath his desk. “You’ll ’elp me?” she asked, and it carried a tiny note of vulnerable hope.

“I’ll help you,” Peter promised, and on impulse, he reached out to take her hand.

Maud seized his fingers in a grip that almost frightened him into shouting for the cop. Grinning, she bent to put on her slippers, then stood—drawing Peter with her—and spread her arms. “Come on, then,” she said, and she wasn’t addressing him. “Come, all my soldiers; come to war. It’s time!”

She started walking as she spoke, away from the door, toward the edge of the roof. The fence there would stop her leaping, but Peter lagged regardless, uneasy at her sudden aura of purpose. “Maud—”

The wind had picked up. All the hairs along Peter’s arms rose, as if there was something, some things, racing past him in swirling flocks. As if they were curling around Maud, coming to her call. She was laughing, and the analytical part of Peter’s brain, the part that had spent half the night matching her words to verses of the song, found a description of the moment that was all too apt. With a host of furious fancies—whereof I am commander—

Fancies. Mad imaginings. As if all the delusions of all the patients below them had suddenly swarmed to this place, taking not-quite-corporeal form.

With a burning spear—

She reached out with her free hand, and when it came back, it glowed with a shaft of impossible light.

And a horse of air—

Maud leapt. Dragging Peter up, up, over the fence, an impossible leap, into the sky and through—

To the wilderness I wander.

He thought he screamed, in that moment between—but they landed hard enough to knock all the air from his lungs and put a stop to sound.

It wasn’t the street below, or any part of the city. Not for an instant did Peter expect it would be. There was an otherness to this place, going beyond the impossible green of the grass beneath his feet, the cool dampness of the air, the perfect silence devoid of birds or insects or even the wind. But it still gave him a jolt as bad as the landing when he looked up and saw where Maud had brought him.

The field was groomed into a perfect chessboard of grass, bare to the starry sky. Peter and Maud stood on one side, and on the other, a figure sat beneath a canopy, like a king or queen on a throne.

That figure shone with soft, silver radiance. The light emanated from skin, hair, clothing, as if the figure were the full moon in human form. Peter’s mind rebelled against the thought, and he jerked his eyes away—only to see the figure wasn’t alone. Others stood ranged behind the canopy, creatures twisted like anger and fear and jealousy, creatures that weren’t human.

His own side was no better. When he turned to Maud, hoping irrationally that she might have an explanation, he saw her own company milling about: the host of furious fancies, he thought, that he’d felt on the rooftop. Fairies. They had brought Maud here.

Brought them both. Because Peter had promised.

Maud was staring at him, eyes wide, hand clenched on that spear of flaring light. It wasn’t the nail-hard glare of before; she seemed lost and hopeful. Waiting for him to do something.

To help.

“What now?” she whispered.

What the hell could he do? This wasn’t psychiatry, not anymore. One look around told him that much, beyond any possibility of denial. Maud’s delusions were real. A childhood of listening to folksongs had not prepared him for this.

And yet, he had promised. He couldn’t go back on that, even if this was no place for a doctor. It would destroy the trust Maud had given him.

Everything seemed to be waiting, on both sides of the field, for someone to make the first move. Maud, or him. What would happen if they did not act?

Like iron to a magnet, his gaze was drawn back across to the shining figure. And now he saw what he had missed before: two others, standing a step back to either side. On the shining figure’s right, an armored form, and on the left, an indistinct male shape, both hidden in shadow.

He’d been more right than he knew, when he dragged up those terms from his half-forgotten undergraduate psychology classes. Animus, anima, shadow, all the complexes and archetypes of Jungian psychology—but the folksong, too, the knight of ghosts and shadows. That would be the armored one; the other . . .

Tom o’ Bedlam.

Peter’s breath caught, as if he’d found himself suddenly on the edge of a great fall. Working through it at home, he’d assumed Maud was mad, and used the song as a structuring framework for her delusions. Then he’d come here, and seen that the delusions were real. Now he stood facing what looked a damn sight like the Moon itself, and it was impossible not to think that maybe Maud was right about something else, too. She didn’t follow the song; it followed her.

The logical conclusion, then, was that Maud wasn’t schizophrenic at all. But she was: Peter knew that, as firmly as he knew his own name. Even though it wrenched his brain, trying to hold both contradictory truths at once. If Maud’s delusions were real, then she wasn’t mad. But she was mad—both creator of and created by this world she’d dragged him into. You’d have to be mad yourself, to wrap your brain around that.

Archetypal figures of lunacy. Mad Maudlin, and Tom o’ Bedlam. The only way for them to exist was to be both at once: insane, and also true.

If that was true . . . then maybe this was the right place for a doctor, after all.

Could he cure Maud?

Common sense said no. Schizophrenia couldn’t be cured, only managed, and the failure of antipsychotics to work on Maud suggested that even the latter was easier said than done. But then, maybe he’d been attacking it from the wrong angle. Chemicals weren’t the answer to a place like this. Here, he had to play by different rules.

The first rule of dealing with a schizophrenic was: never buy into their delusions.

Never encourage them, never participate in the things they imagined. But he didn’t have much choice. He stood ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end, and the only way out was through.

Ignoring the shudder that ran down his back, Peter studied the other side of the field, and tried to bring everything he knew of psychology to bear. Figures of emotion, many of them negative. The Moon, with Tom, the estranged animus, standing in its shadow. Repressed, Peter thought. Disowned. Sent from the self into the shadow, which gives the Moon—mental illness—power over them both. But how to get him back?

“You told me this has happened before,” Peter said. He heard his own voice almost like a stranger’s, the level, soothing tones of a psychiatrist so incongruous in this alien field. “You’ve won Tom back, in the past?”

Maud nodded. “But it’s different every time.”

Unsurprising. If the solution stayed the same, this wouldn’t be much of a struggle. “What did you do, those other times? How did you reclaim him?”

He suspected he knew the answer, from old verses of the song, ones that had fallen out of use. Maud confirmed it. “Jousted against the Whore of Babel once,” she said, and something like the old contempt curled her lip briefly. “Tossed ’er on ’er arse—that were a good night. Fought a dragon once. Other monsters, too.”

“When we talked before, you said you wanted to kill the Moon. Do you think that’s what you need to do?”

Maud trembled, shrinking in on herself. Peter thought she cast a swift glance across the field. On the far side, the Moon sat serene, as if waiting for Maud to take action. Some verses spoke of it as female, others as male; the actual figure could be either, shifting every time Peter looked.

“Maud,” he repeated, softly, “do you want to fight?”

She shook her head, making the ends of the ropes whip back and forth. “Can’t.”

“Why can’t you fight?”

Another brief flicker of a glance, this one more definite. Peter would have bet his hope of going home that she looked at Tom. Shifting the angle of his questions slightly, he asked, “Why do you think fighting brings Tom back?”

The fairies were hovering avidly around them, making his skin crawl. They were the delusions of his patients; his, and many others. Perhaps all the patients in the world. In the distance he heard a cruel laugh, and wondered which of the Moon’s creatures it was. Anger? Fear? “When you beats someone,” Maud said, “you can make them do what you wants.”

“But you said you fought a dragon, and other things—not the Moon. And it wasn’t always about fighting.” He waited to see if she would respond to that, and when she didn’t, he went back to Tom. “You disdained Tom, right, Maud? The song says you did—that you somehow crossed him. He’s angry at you, and you at him. Why would he come back to you, just because you fought?”

Still no answer. He wanted to say, you have to reclaim the parts of yourself you think of as masculine. But he couldn’t just feed her the answer straight out. That didn’t work on ordinary problems, like anxiety or depression; he could hardly expect it to work on archetypal schizophrenia.

He was doing this all wrong anyway—approaching it like a therapist, not like the metaphor of a therapist. With an ordinary patient, talk therapy could take weeks, months, circling around the ideas again and again until the subject was finally ready to admit the truth to herself. That was usually what it boiled down to, the therapist as—

His breath caught a second time. Oh, hell. First Jungian metaphors, and now Rogerian psychotherapy? None of this was standard operating procedure for schizophrenia. But his instincts had led him right so far; in the absence of anything better, he might as well keep going.

He bowed to Maud, a reflexive move, inspired by the notion of this place as a tournament field. “Dame Maudlin—”

“I ain’t no knight,” she said sharply, frowning at him.

Not an auspicious start. “What makes a knight?”

“A knighting.” Now her frown suggested he was an idiot.

“A tap of the sword on the shoulder?” Peter asked, in tones that invited doubt. “I would say that by summoning you to this tournament, they have recognized you as a knight—as one worthy to stand on this field of honor.” Were those phrases his own, crafted out of childhood memory, or was this place feeding them to him? He wasn’t sure he wanted the answer to that question.

Maud wavered. But he needed her to go along with this; without it, none of the rest would make much sense. Grasping at straws, Peter dug in his pocket for a pen, and brandished it in the air. “With this my symbol of authority, I shall make formal what until now has only been recognized in deed. Kneel.”

She obeyed, surprising him. Tapping her on the shoulders and head with the pen, he said, “I dub thee Dame Maudlin, champion of all souls lost to madness. For them you shall face your enemy, and emerge victorious. Rise, Dame Maudlin.”

She did, with a feral grin. But Peter stopped her before she could charge off. “Would it not be better to observe the formalities? Your victory should not be tainted by misconduct; it would sully your honor as a knight. If you will permit me, then I will serve as your messenger, and request a parlay from the other side.”

She objected to this notion almost as much as she had to the title. “Parlay? Thought you said I was ’ere to thrash them.”

“All in good time,” Peter said, wondering if his idea was wrong after all. But Maud had fought before, and always she found herself back here, having to fight again. Surely it was worth trying something new. “This will give you an opportunity to, ah—” Inspiration struck again. “To deliver your challenge in person.”

Maud liked the idea of that. “All right. I’ll meet with them. Do I come with you?”

“No,” Peter said, hiding his own smile. “I will cross. If they agree, I will wait in the middle of the field, and you and the other party shall come to me.”

For all the confidence he projected to Maud, Peter’s hackles rose when he stepped out onto the field. The fairies hooted and cheered, a cacophony of sound, echoed from the far side by the howls and jeers of the Moon’s creatures. If they rushed him . . . he didn’t think psychological theory was likely to make a very good defense against insanity en masse.

Too late for such considerations now. As soon as he came within range of the Moon, he sank to one knee. “I bring a message from Dame Maudlin.”

The silver face was remote, showing only the faintest hint of interest. Peter thought, looking at it, that he could see every lunar symbol he’d ever encountered: tarot cards, werewolves, the Apollo missions, fat smiling faces in children’s books, everything superimposed at once upon a single figure. And the voice ran like ice down his spine when the Moon answered, “We are always glad to hear from our subjects.”

Should he challenge the implication that Maud was her subject? No, that would come of its own accord, if his idea worked. And if it didn’t, well, there was always the brawling option. “Dame Maudlin requests parlay before the tournament begins. With that one.”

He nodded at Tom o’ Bedlam.

The figure stirred within the shadow. This, Peter cautioned himself, was a being as dangerous as Maud; more, perhaps, for Tom was the Moon’s captive thrall. Who could say where his loyalties lay?

The Moon sat motionless: not the stillness of a person, whose heart still beat within, but the perfect stasis of something that was never alive at all. Then it said, “Very well, champion of the Sun. Claim them if you can.”

Peter’s heart stuttered. Of course the Moon would guess; he could hardly hope to fight for rationalism and sanity here, and not have lunacy notice. No, what sent tension dancing along his nerves was the cool amusement in the Moon’s voice. It seemed to laugh at something he could not see.

The only way out is through.

Peter retreated to the center of the field and beckoned to Maud, on the far side. As she approached, and the hidden figure stepped out of the Moon’s shadow, he closed his eyes and built a vision in his own mind.

The therapist as mirror, showing the client herself from different angles, all the aspects she lacked the perspective to see—or would not see. But the mirror was devoid of judgment; it did not condemn what it reflected. Unconditional positive regard, Carl Rogers had called it. That was what Peter must give her now—give them. Maud and Tom both.

That was what he must become.

His body flattened into a silver pane, stretching until it blocked all sight from one half of the field to the other. All Maud could see, approaching, was her own reflection, growing larger and more distinct with each step.

A male reflection. Tom o’ Bedlam. And on the mirror’s other side, Tom himself gazed into Maudlin’s eyes.

Both sides feared the other’s rejection. Fighting didn’t erase that fear. But Peter rejected neither: he understood their madness and accepted it. Through him, they could reconcile at last.

Maud, trembling, reached one hand out, as on the other side Tom did the same.

When their fingers touched, the mirror shattered—and one figure was left standing in the center of the field.

A strong-featured woman, with something of Tom’s look about her. He’d been a part of her psyche originally, before repression had driven him into shadow, putting them both under the Moon’s control. Together they had passed untold ages, joining and parting, rising briefly toward sanity, only to fall into the depths of madness once more. Always had it been thus.

Always . . . until now.

The howls of the fairies could have cracked the sky. Whether they rejoiced or rebelled was impossible to tell; it was an elemental cry, thunder following the lightning of the reunification they had just witnessed. The woman raised her hand to them, but it had no effect. A sane person could no longer be their commander.

From his new vantage point, Peter said, “What now?”

The answer came in cool, unruffled tones. “Now she returns to the world of the Sun. She was an ordinary woman once, and so she is again. She has no place here.”

The woman was leaving the field, heading to the side, away from both gathered armies. “Will she remember any of this?”

“As a dream, nothing more. Only the mad believe in such things as these.”

The mad—and the psychiatrist who healed them. Peter wondered what he was going to say when he got back. He would never look at a patient the same way again, now that he’d seen the creatures that personified their syndromes and disorders, and the entity that ruled over them.

And what would the world do, without Mad Maudlin and Tom o’ Bedlam to embody its madness?

Peter turned and bowed to the Moon. “Thank you. You have opened my eyes in a way I never imagined possible. I will carry the effects of it with me forever.”

The Moon bestowed a serene smile upon him. “Yes. You will.”

“There wasn’t any evidence of a crime,” Peter said, “other than the blood. Which didn’t match any known victim, and there wasn’t anything to connect her to any missing persons. So in the end, they let her go.”

Shawna Cross, one of the hospital’s junior doctors, shook her head in amazement. “No, that part makes sense. What I’m sticking on is the bit where you say she made a full recovery.”

“As near as I can tell,” Peter cautioned. “I haven’t seen her in a year. But she certainly wasn’t a danger to anyone anymore.” Peter downed the last of his coffee, then signaled to the waitress for the check.

“And you did it by talking to her?” Shawna shook her head. “One conversation in the garden, and she comes back cured. If that’s true—and I’m not saying I buy it—then I can’t believe you quit. I get half a dozen schizophrenics every week, a lot of them repeat customers. Can’t do much for them, and it breaks my heart. We could use your magic, man.”

Peter smiled, digging for his wallet in his back pocket. “Sorry. But I can’t do it anymore; I can’t look at those people and see them as diseases to be cured. You have to accept them for who they are.”

“Easy for you to say. They aren’t vomiting on you anymore, or trying to stab you with their own IV needles.” Shawna dropped a few bills on the table. “Speaking of which, my break’s over. Back to the salt mines, I guess. Thanks for the story.”

Peter whispered his reply to the restaurant door, swinging shorter and shorter arcs in Shawna’s wake. “They still do those things. But it’s okay. I accept them anyway.”

“Naturally you do,” the Moon said, sitting where Shawna had been. Its radiance dimmed all the lights in the restaurant, casting everyone into shadow. “You cannot condemn the realm to which you now belong.”

The memory of the time when he would have condemned it was fading, almost forgotten. The Moon had shown him a hundred thousand variants on madness, more than he ever could have imagined before—and Peter loved them all.

“Come, my champion,” the shining figure said. “We have much work to do.”

]]>https://www.tor.com/2014/02/05/mad-maudlin-marie-brennan/feed/16The Tropic of Serpents (Excerpt)https://www.tor.com/2014/01/16/the-tropic-of-serpents-excerpt-marie-brennan/
https://www.tor.com/2014/01/16/the-tropic-of-serpents-excerpt-marie-brennan/#respondThu, 16 Jan 2014 14:00:00 +0000http://www.tor.com/2014/01/16/the-tropic-of-serpents-excerpt-marie-brennan/Three years after her fateful journeys through the forbidding mountains of Vystrana, Mrs. Camherst defies family and convention to embark on an expedition to the war-torn continent of Eriga, home of such exotic draconian species as the grass-dwelling snakes of the savannah, arboreal tree snakes, and, most elusive of all, the legendary swamp-wyrms of the tropics.]]>

Check out The Tropic of Serpents, the second novel in Marie Brennan’s Lady Trent Memoirs, available March 4th from Tor Books!

Three years after her fateful journeys through the forbidding mountains of Vystrana, Mrs. Camherst defies family and convention to embark on an expedition to the war-torn continent of Eriga, home of such exotic draconian species as the grass-dwelling snakes of the savannah, arboreal tree snakes, and, most elusive of all, the legendary swamp-wyrms of the tropics.

The expedition is not an easy one. Accompanied by both an old associate and a runaway heiress, Isabella must brave oppressive heat, merciless fevers, palace intrigues, gossip, and other hazards in order to satisfy her boundless fascination with all things draconian, even if it means venturing deep into the forbidden jungle known as the Green Hell… where her courage, resourcefulness, and scientific curiosity will be tested as never before.

ONE

My life of solitude—My sister-in-law and my mother—
An unexpected visitor—Trouble at Kemble’s

Not long before I embarked on my journey to Eriga, I girded my loins and set out for a destination I considered much more dangerous: Falchester.

The capital was not, in the ordinary way of things, a terribly adventurous place, except insofar as I might be rained upon there. I made the trip from Pasterway on a regular basis, as I had affairs to monitor in the city. Those trips, however, were not well-publicized—by which I mean I mentioned them to only a handful of people, all of them discreet. So far as most of Scirland knew (those few who cared to know), I was a recluse, and had been so since my return from Vystrana.

I was permitted reclusiveness on account of my personal troubles, though in reality I spent more of my time on work: first the publication of our Vystrani research, and then preparation for this Erigan expedition, which had been delayed and delayed again, by forces far beyond our control. On that Graminis morning, however, I could no longer escape the social obligations I assiduously buried beneath those other tasks. The best I could do was to discharge them both in quick succession: to visit first my blood relations, and then those bound to me by marriage.

My house in Pasterway was only a short drive from the fashionable district of Havistow, where my eldest brother Paul had settled the prior year. I usually escaped the necessity of visiting his house by the double gift of his frequent absence and his wife’s utter disinterest in me, but on this occasion I had been invited, and it would have been more trouble to refuse.

Please understand, it is not that I disliked my family. Most of us got on cordially enough, and I was on quite good terms with Andrew, the brother most immediately senior to me. But the rest of my brothers found me baffling, to say the least, and my mother’s censure of my behaviour had nudged their opinions toward disapproval. What Paul wanted with me that day I did not know— but on the whole, I would have preferred to face a disgruntled Vystrani rock-wyrm.

Alas, those were all quite far away, while my brother was too near to avoid. With a sensation of girding for battle, I lifted my skirt in ladylike delicacy, climbed the front steps, and rang the bell.

My sister-in-law was in the morning room when the footman escorted me in. Judith was a paragon of upper-class Scirling wifehood, in all the ways I was not: beautifully dressed, without crossing the line into gyver excess; a gracious hostess, facilitating her husband’s work by social means; and a dedicated mother, with three children already, and no doubt more to come.

We had precisely one thing in common, which was Paul. “Have I called at the wrong time?” I inquired, after accepting a cup of tea.

“Not at all,” Judith answered. “He is not at home just now—a meeting with Lord Melst—but you are welcome to stay until he returns.”

Lord Melst? Paul was moving up in the world. “I presume this is Synedrion business,” I said.

Judith nodded. “We had a short respite after he won his chair, but now the affairs of government have moved in to occupy his time. I hardly expect to see him between now and Gelis.”

Which meant I might be cooling my heels here for a very long time. “If it is not too much trouble,” I said, putting down my teacup and rising from my seat, “I think it might be better for me to leave and come back. I have promised to pay a visit to my brotherin-law Matthew today as well.”

To my surprise, Judith put out her hand to stop me. “No, please stay. We have a guest right now, who was hoping to see you—”

I never had the chance to ask who the guest was, though I had my suspicions the moment Judith began to speak. The door to the sitting room opened, and my mother came in.

Now it all made sense. I had ceased to answer my mother’s letters some time before, for my own peace of mind. She would not, even when asked, leave off criticizing my every move, and implying that my bad judgment had caused me to lose my husband in Vystrana. It was not courteous to ignore her, but the alternative would be worse. For her to see me, therefore, she must either show up unannounced at my house… or lure me to another’s.

Such logic did little to sweeten my reaction. Unless my mother was there to offer reconciliation—which I doubted—this was a trap. I had rather pull my own teeth out than endure more of her recriminations. (And lest you think that a mere figure of speech, I should note that I did once pull my own tooth out, so I do not make the comparison lightly.)

As it transpired, though, her recriminations were at least drawing on fresh material. My mother said, “Isabella. What is this nonsense I hear about you going to Eriga?”

I have been known to bypass the niceties of small talk, and ordinarily I am grateful for it in others. In this instance, however, it had the effect of an arrow shot from cover, straight into my brain. “What?” I said, quite stupidly—not because I failed to understand her, but because I had no idea how she had come to hear of it.

“You know perfectly well what I mean,” she went on, relentlessly. “It is absurd, Isabella. You cannot go abroad again, and certainly not to any part of Eriga. They are at war there!”

I sought my chair once more, using the delay to regain my composure. “That is an exaggeration, Mama, and you know it. Bayembe is not at war. The mansa of Talu dares not invade, not with Scirling soldiers helping to defend the borders.”

My mother sniffed. “I imagine the man who drove the Akhians out of Elerqa—after two hundred years!—dares a great deal indeed. And even if he does not attack, what of those dreadful Ikwunde?”

“The entire jungle of Mouleen lies between them and Bayembe,” I said, irritated. “Save at the rivers, of course, and Scirland stands guard there as well. Mama, the whole point of our military presence is to make the place safe.”

The look she gave me was dire. “Soldiers do not make a place safe, Isabella. They only make it less dangerous.”

What skill I have in rhetoric, I inherited from my mother. I was in no mood to admire her phrasing that day, though. Nor to be pleased at her political awareness, which was quite startling. Most Scirling women of her class, and a great many men, too, could barely name the two Erigan powers that had forced Bayembe to seek foreign—which is to say Scirling—aid. Gentlemen back then were interested only in the lopsided “trade agreement” that sent Bayembe iron to Scirland, along with other valuable resources, in exchange for them allowing us to station our soldiers all over their country, and build a colony in Nsebu. Ladies were not interested much at all.

Was this something she had attended to before, or had she educated herself upon hearing of my plans? Either way, this was not how I had intended to break the news to her. Just how I had intended to do it, I had not yet decided; I kept putting off the issue, out of what I now recognized as rank cowardice. And this was the consequence: an unpleasant confrontation in front of my sister-in-law, whose stiffly polite expression told me that she had known this was coming.

(A sudden worm of suspicion told me that Paul, too, had known. Meeting with Lord Melst, indeed. Such a shame he was out when I arrived.)

It meant, at least, that I only had to face my mother, without allies to support her in censure. I was not fool enough to think I would have had allies of my own. I said, “The Foreign Office would not allow people to travel there, let alone settle, if it were so dangerous as all that. And they have been allowing it, so there you are.” She did not need to know that one of the recurrent delays in this expedition had involved trying to persuade the Foreign Office to grant us visas. “Truly, Mama, I shall be at far more risk from malaria than from any army.”

What possessed me to say that, I do not know, but it was sheer idiocy on my part. My mother’s glare sharpened. “Indeed,” she said, and the word could have frosted glass. “Yet you propose to go to a place teeming with tropical diseases, without a single thought for your son.”

Her accusation was both fair and not. It was true that I did not think as much of my son as one might expect. I gave very little milk after his birth and had to hire a wet-nurse, which suited me all too well; infant Jacob reminded me far too much of his late namesake. Now he was more than two years old, weaned, and in the care of a nanny. My marriage settlement had provided quite generously for me, but much of that money I had poured into scientific research, and the books of our Vystrani expedition— the scholarly work under my husband’s name, and my own inane bit of travel writing—were not bringing in as much as one might hope. Out of what remained, however, I paid handsomely for someone to care for my son, and not because the widow of a baronet’s second son ought not to stoop to such work herself. I simply did not know what to do with Jacob otherwise.

People often suppose that maternal wisdom is wholly instinctual: that however ignorant a woman may be of child rearing prior to giving birth, the mere fact of her sex will afterward endow her with perfect capability. This is not true even on the grossest biological level, as the failure of my milk had proved, and it is even less true in social terms. In later years I have come to understand children from the perspective of a natural historian; I know their development, and have some appreciation for its marvellous progress. But at that point in time, little Jacob made less sense to me than a dragon.

Is the rearing of a child best performed by a woman who has done it before, who has honed her skills over the years and enjoys her work, or by a woman with no skill and scant enjoyment, whose sole qualification is a direct biological connection? My opinion fell decidedly on the former, and so I saw very little practical reason why I should not go to Eriga. In that respect, I had given a great deal of thought to the matter of my son.

Saying such things to my mother was, however, out of the question. Instead I temporized. “Matthew Camherst and his wife have offered to take him in while I am gone. Bess has one of her own, very near the same age; it will be good for Jacob to have a companion.”

“And if you die?”

The question dropped like a cleaver onto the conversation, severing it short. I felt my cheeks burning: with anger, or with shame—likely both. I was outraged that my mother should say such a thing so bluntly… and yet my husband had died in Vystrana. It was not impossible that I should do the same in Eriga.

Into this dead and bleeding silence came a knock on the door, followed shortly by the butler, salver in hand, bowing to present a card to Judith, who lifted it, mechanically, as if she were a puppet and someone had pulled the string on her arm. Confusion carved a small line between her brows. “Who is Thomas Wilker?”

The name had the effect of a low, unnoticed kerb at the edge of a street, catching my mental foot and nearly causing me to fall on my face. “Thomas Wil—what is he doing here?” Comprehension followed, tardily, lifting me from my stumble. Judith did not know him, and neither did my mother, which left only one answer. “Ah. I think he must be here to see me.”

Judith’s posture snapped to a rigid, upright line, for this was not how social calls were conducted. A man should not inquire after a widow in a house that wasn’t hers. I spared a moment to notice that the card, which Judith dropped back on the salver, was not a proper calling card; it appeared to be a piece of paper with Mr. Wilker’s name written in by hand. Worse and worse. Mr. Wilker was not, properly speaking, a gentleman, and certainly not the sort of person who would call here in the normal course of things.

I did what I could to retrieve the moment. “I do apologize. Mr. Wilker is an assistant to the earl of Hilford—you recall him, of course; he is the one who arranged the Vystrani expedition.” And was arranging the Erigan one, too, though his health precluded him from accompanying us. But what business of that could be so urgent that Lord Hilford would send Mr. Wilker after me at my brother’s house? “I should speak with him, but there’s no need to trouble you. I will take my leave.”

My mother’s outstretched hand stopped me before I could stand. “Not at all. I think we’re all eager to hear what this Mr. Wilker has to say.”

The butler bowed and retired. By the alacrity with which Mr. Wilker appeared, he must have sprang forward the instant he was welcomed in; agitation still showed in his movements. But he had long since taken pains to cultivate better manners than those he had grown up with, and so he presented himself first to Judith. “Good morning, Mrs. Hendemore. My name is Thomas Wilker. I’m sorry to trouble you, but I have a message for Mrs. Camherst. We must have passed one another on the road; I only just missed her at her house. And I’m afraid the news is unfortunate enough that it could not wait. I was told she would be visiting here.”

The curt, disjointed way in which he delivered these words made my hands tighten in apprehension. Mr. Wilker was, quite rightly, looking only at Judith, save a brief nod when he spoke my name; with no hint forthcoming from him, I found myself exchanging a glance instead with my mother.

What I saw there startled me. We’re all eager to hear what this Mr. Wilker has to say—she thought he was my lover! An overstatement, perhaps, but she had the expression of a woman looking for signs of inappropriate attachment, and coming up emptyhanded.

As well she should. Mr. Wilker and I might no longer be at loggerheads the way we had been in Vystrana, but I felt no romantic affection for him, nor he for me. Our relationship was purely one of business.

I wanted to set my mother down in no uncertain terms for harboring such thoughts, but forbore. Not so much because of the sheer inappropriateness of having that conversation in public, but because it occurred to me that Mr. Wilker and I were engaged in two matters of business, of which the Erigan expedition was only one.

Judith, fortunately, waved Mr. Wilker on before I could burst out with my questions unbidden. “By all means, Mr. Wilker. Or is your message private?”

I would not have taken the message privately for a hundred sovereigns, not with such suspicions in my mother’s mind. “Please,” I said. “What has happened?”

Mr. Wilker blew out a long breath, and the urgency drained from him in a sudden rush, leaving him sagging and defeated. “There’s been a break-in at Kemble’s.”

“Kemble’s… oh, no.” My own shoulders sagged, a mirror to his. “What did they destroy? Or—”

He nodded, grimly. “Took. His notes.”

Theft, not destruction. Someone knew what Kemble was working on, and was determined to steal it for their own.

I slumped back in my chair, ladylike dignity the furthest thing from my mind. Frederick Kemble was the chemist Mr. Wilker had hired—or rather I had hired; the money was mine, although the choice of recipient was his—to continue the research we ourselves had stolen in the mountains of Vystrana, three years ago. Research that documented a method for preserving dragonbone: an amazing substance, strong and light, but one that decayed quickly outside a living body.

The Chiavoran who developed that method was not the first one to try. What had begun as a mere challenge of taxidermy— born from the desire of hunters to preserve trophies from the dragons they killed, and the desire of natural historians to preserve specimens for study—had become a great point of curiosity for chemists. Several were racing to be the first (or so they thought) to solve that puzzle. Despite our best efforts to maintain secrecy around Kemble’s work, it seemed someone had learned of it.

“When?” I asked, then waved the question away as foolish. “Last night, and I doubt we’ll get any time more specific than that.” Mr. Wilker shook his head. He lived in the city, and visited Kemble first thing in the morning every Selemer. This news was as fresh as it could be, short of Kemble having heard the intruder and come downstairs in his nightclothes to see.

I wondered, suddenly cold, what would have happened if he had. Would the intruder have fled? Or would Mr. Wilker have found our chemist dead this morning?

Such thoughts were unnecessarily dramatic—or so I chided myself. Whether they were or not, I did not have the leisure to dwell on them, for my mother’s sharp voice roused me from my thoughts. “Isabella. What in heaven is this man talking about?”

I took a measure of comfort in the irreverent thought that at least she could not read any hint of personal indiscretion in the message Mr. Wilker had brought. “Research, Mama,” I said, pulling myself straight in my chair, and thence to my feet. “Nothing that need concern you. But I’m afraid I must cut this visit short; it is vital that I speak to Mr. Kemble at once. If you will excuse me—”

She must be concerned indeed, to broach such a personal matter before a stranger like Mr. Wilker. “We will speak of it later, Mama,” I said, intending no such thing. “This truly is a pressing matter. I’ve invested a great deal of money in Mr. Kemble’s work, and must find out how much I have lost.”

]]>https://www.tor.com/2014/01/16/the-tropic-of-serpents-excerpt-marie-brennan/feed/0A Natural History of Dragons (Excerpt)https://www.tor.com/2012/12/13/a-natural-history-of-dragons-excerpt/
https://www.tor.com/2012/12/13/a-natural-history-of-dragons-excerpt/#commentsThu, 13 Dec 2012 18:00:00 +0000http://www.tor.com/2012/12/13/a-natural-history-of-dragons-excerpt/Here at last, in her own words, is the true story of a pioneering spirit who risked her reputation, her prospects, and her fragile flesh and bone to satisfy her scientific curiosity; of how she sought true love and happiness despite her lamentable eccentricities; and of her thrilling expedition to the perilous mountains of Vystrana, where she made the first of many historic discoveries that would change the world forever.]]>

You, dear reader, continue at your own risk. It is not for the faint of heart—no more so than the study of dragons itself. But such study offers rewards beyond compare: to stand in a dragon’s presence, even for the briefest of moments—even at the risk of one’s life—is a delight that, once experienced, can never be forgotten. . . .

All the world, from Scirland to the farthest reaches of Eriga, know Isabella, Lady Trent, to be the world’s preeminent dragon naturalist. She is the remarkable woman who brought the study of dragons out of the misty shadows of myth and misunderstanding into the clear light of modern science. But before she became the illustrious figure we know today, there was a bookish young woman whose passion for learning, natural history, and, yes, dragons defied the stifling conventions of her day.

Here at last, in her own words, is the true story of a pioneering spirit who risked her reputation, her prospects, and her fragile flesh and bone to satisfy her scientific curiosity; of how she sought true love and happiness despite her lamentable eccentricities; and of her thrilling expedition to the perilous mountains of Vystrana, where she made the first of many historic discoveries that would change the world forever.

PREFACE

Not a day goes by that the post does not bring me at least one letter from a young person (or sometimes one not so young) who wishes to follow in my footsteps and become a dragon naturalist. Nowadays, of course, the field is quite respectable, with university courses and intellectual societies putting out fat volumes titled Proceedings of some meeting or other. Those interested in respectable things, however, attend my lectures. The ones who write to me invariably want to hear about my adventures: my escape from captivity in the swamps of Mouleen, or my role in the great Battle of Keonga, or (most frequently) my flight to the inhospitable heights of the Mrtyahaima peaks, the only place on earth where the secrets of dragonkind could be unlocked.

Even the most dedicated of letter-writers could not hope to answer all these queries personally. I have therefore accepted the offer from Messrs. Carrigdon & Rudge to publish a series of memoirs chronicling the more interesting portions of my life. By and large these shall focus on those expeditions which led to the discovery for which I have become so famous, but there shall also be occasional digressions into matters more entertaining, personal, or even (yes) salacious. One benefit of being an old woman now, and moreover one who has been called a “national treasure,” is that there are very few who can tell me what I may and may not write.

Be warned, then: the collected volumes of this series will contain frozen mountains, foetid swamps, hostile foreigners, hostile fellow countrymen, the occasional hostile family member, bad decisions, misadventures in orienteering, diseases of an unromantic sort, and a plenitude of mud. You continue at your own risk. It is not for the faint of heart—no more so than the study of dragons itself. But such study offers rewards beyond compare: to stand in a dragon’s presence, even for the briefest of moments—even at the risk of one’s life—is a delight that, once experienced, can never be forgotten. If my humble words convey even a fraction of that wonder, I will rest content.

We must, of course, begin at the beginning, before the series of discoveries and innovations that transformed the world into the one you, dear reader, know so well. In this ancient and nearly forgotten age lie the modest origins of my immodest career: my childhood and my first foreign expedition, to the mountains of Vystrana. The basic facts of this expedition have long since become common knowledge, but there is much more to the tale than you have heard.

Isabella, Lady Trent
Casselthwaite, Linshire
11 Floris, 5658

PART ONE

In which the memoirist
forms a youthful obsession with dragons,
and engineers an opportunity
to pursue that obsession

ONE

Greenie — An unfortunate incident with a dove —
My obsession with wings — My family — The influence
of Sir Richard Edgeworth

When I was seven, I found a sparkling lying dead on a bench at the edge of the woods which formed the back boundary of our garden, that the groundskeeper had not yet cleared away. With much excitement, I brought it for my mother to see, but by the time I reached her it had mostly collapsed into ash in my hands. Mama exclaimed in distaste and sent me to wash.

Our cook, a tall and gangly woman who nonetheless produced the most amazing soups and soufflés (thus putting the lie to the notion that one cannot trust a slender cook) was the one who showed me the secret of preserving sparklings after death. She kept one on her dresser top, which she brought out for me to see when I arrived in her kitchen, much cast down from the loss of the sparkling and from my mother’s chastisement. “However did you keep it?” I asked her, wiping away my tears. “Mine fell all to pieces.”

“Vinegar,” she said, and that one word set me upon the path that led to where I stand today.

If found soon enough after death, a sparkling (as many of the readers of this volume no doubt know) may be preserved by embalming it in vinegar. I sailed forth into our gardens in determined search, a jar of vinegar crammed into one of my dress pockets so the skirt hung all askew. The first one I found lost its right wing in the process of preservation, but before the week was out I had an intact specimen: a sparkling an inch and a half in length, his scales a deep emerald in color. With the boundless ingenuity of a child, I named him Greenie, and he sits on a shelf in my study to this day, tiny wings outspread.

Sparklings were not the only things I collected in those days. I was forever bringing home other insects and beetles (for back then we classified sparklings as an insect species that simply resembled dragons, which today we know to be untrue), and many other things besides: interesting rocks, discarded bird feathers, fragments of eggshell, bones of all kinds. Mama threw fits until I formed a pact with my maid, that she would not breathe a word of my treasures, and I would give her an extra hour a week during which she could sit down and rest her feet. Thereafter my collections hid in cigar boxes and the like, tucked safely into my closets where my mother would not go.

No doubt some of my inclinations came about because I was the sole daughter in a set of six children. Surrounded as I was by boys, and with our house rather isolated in the countryside of Tamshire, I quite believed that collecting odd things was what children did, regardless of sex. My mother’s attempts to educate me otherwise left little mark, I fear. Some of my interest also came from my father, who like any gentleman in those days kept himself moderately informed of developments in all fields: law, theology, economics, natural history, and more.

The remainder of it, I fancy, was inborn curiosity. I would sit in the kitchens (where I was permitted to be, if not encouraged, only because it meant I was not outside getting dirty and ruining my dresses), and ask the cook questions as she stripped a chicken carcass for the soup. “Why do chickens have wishbones?” I asked her one day.

One of the kitchen maids answered me in the fatuous tones of an adult addressing a child. “To make wishes on!” she said brightly, handing me one that had already been dried. “You take one side of it—”

“I know what we do with them,” I said impatiently, cutting her off without much tact. “That’s not what chickens have them for, though, or surely the chicken would have wished not to end up in the pot for our supper.”

“Heavens, child, I don’t know what they grow them for,” the cook said. “But you find them in all kinds of birds—chickens, turkeys, geese, pigeons, and the like.”

The notion that all birds should share this feature was intriguing, something I had never before considered. My curiosity soon drove me to an act which I blush to think upon today, not for the act itself (as I have done similar things many times since then, if in a more meticulous and scholarly fashion), but for the surreptitious and naive manner in which I carried it out.

In my wanderings one day, I found a dove which had fallen dead under a hedgerow. I immediately remembered what the cook had said, that all birds had wishbones. She had not named doves in her list, but doves were birds, were they not? Perhaps I might learn what they were for, as I could not learn when I watched the footman carve up a goose at the dinner table.

I took the dove’s body and hid it behind the hayrick next to the barn, then stole inside and pinched a penknife from Andrew, the brother immediately senior to me, without him knowing. Once outside again, I settled down to my study of the dove.

I was organized, if not perfectly sensible, in my approach to the work. I had seen the maids plucking birds for the cook, so I understood that the first step was to remove the feathers—a task which proved harder than I had expected, and appallingly messy. It did afford me a chance, though, to see how the shaft of the feather fitted into its follicle (a word I did not know at the time), and the different kinds of feathers.

When the bird was more or less naked, I spent some time moving its wings and feet about, seeing how they operated—and, in truth, steeling myself for what I had determined to do next. Eventually curiosity won out over squeamishness, and I took my brother’s penknife, set it against the skin of the bird’s belly, and cut.

The smell was tremendous—in retrospect, I’m sure I perforated the bowel—but my fascination held. I examined the gobbets of flesh that came out, unsure what most of them were, for to me livers and kidneys were things I had only ever seen on a supper plate. I recognized the intestines, however, and made a judicious guess at the lungs and heart. Squeamishness overcome, I continued my work, peeling back the skin, prying away muscles, seeing how it all connected. I uncovered the bones, one by one, marveling at the delicacy of the wings, the wide keel of the sternum.

I had just discovered the wishbone when I heard a shout behind me, and turned to see a stableboy staring at me in horror.

While he bolted off, I began frantically trying to cover my mess, dragging hay over the dismembered body of the dove, but so distressed was I that the main result was to make myself look even worse than before. By the time Mama arrived on the scene, I was covered in blood and bits of dove-flesh, feathers and hay, and more than a few tears.

I will not tax my readers with a detailed description of the treatment I received at that point; the more adventurous among you have no doubt experienced similar chastisement after your own escapades. In the end I found myself in my father’s study, standing clean and shamefaced on his Akhian carpet.

“Isabella,” he said, his voice forbidding, “what possessed you to do such a thing?”

Out it all came, in a flood of words, about the dove I had found (I assured him, over and over again, that it had been dead when I came upon it, that I most certainly had not killed it), and about my curiosity regarding the wishbone—on and on I went, until Papa came forward and knelt before me, putting one hand on my shoulder and stopping me at last.

“You wanted to know how it worked?” he asked.

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak again lest the flood pick up where it had left off.

He sighed. “Your behaviour was not appropriate for a young lady. Do you understand that?” I nodded. “Let’s make certain you remember it, then.” With one hand he turned me about, and with the other he administered three brisk smacks to my bottom that started the tears afresh. When I had myself under control once more, I found that he had left me to compose myself and gone to the wall of his study. The shelves there were lined with books, some, I fancied, weighing as much as I did myself. (This was pure fancy, of course; the weightiest book in my library now, my own De draconum varietatibus, weighs a mere ten pounds.)

The volume he took down was much lighter, if rather thicker than one would normally give to a seven-year-old child. He pressed it into my hands, saying, “Your lady mother would not be happy to see you with this, I imagine, but I had rather you learn it from a book than from experimentation. Run along, now, and don’t show that to her.”

I curtseyed and fled.

Like Greenie, that book still sits on my shelf. My father had given me Gotherham’s Avian Anatomy, and though our understanding of the subject has improved a great deal since Gotherham’s day, it was a good introduction for me at the time. The text was only half comprehensible to me, but I devoured the half I could understand and contemplated the rest in fascinated perplexity. Best of all were the diagrams, thin, meticulous drawings of avian skeletons and musculature. From this book I learned that the function of the wishbone (or, more properly, the furcula) is to strengthen the thoracic skeleton of birds and provide attachment points for wing muscles.

It seemed so simple, so obvious: all birds had wishbones, because all birds flew. (At the time I was not aware of ostriches, and neither was Gotherham.) Hardly a brilliant conclusion in the field of natural history, but to me it was brilliant indeed, and opened up a world I had never considered before: a world in which one could observe patterns and their circumstances, and from these derive information not obvious to the unaided eye.

Wings, truly, were my first obsession. I did not much discriminate in those days as to whether the wings in question belonged to a dove or a sparkling or a butterfly; the point was that these beings flew, and for that I adored them. I might mention, however, that although Mr. Gotherham’s text concerns itself with birds, he does make the occasional, tantalizing reference to analogous structures or behaviours in dragonkind. Since (as I have said before) sparklings were then classed as a variety of insect, this might count as my first introduction to the wonder of dragons.

I should speak at least in passing of my family, for without them I would not have become the woman I am today.

Of my mother I expect you have some sense already; she was an upright and proper woman of her class, and did the best she could to teach me ladylike ways, but no one can achieve the impossible. Any faults in my character must not be laid at her feet. As for my father, his business interests kept him often from home, and so to me he was a more distant figure, and perhaps more tolerant because of it; he had the luxury of seeing my misbehaviours as charming quirks of his daughter’s nature, while my mother faced the messes and ruined clothing those quirks produced. I looked upon him as one might upon a minor pagan god, earnestly desiring his goodwill, but never quite certain how to propitiate him.

Where siblings are concerned, I was the fourth in a set of six children, and, as I have said, the only daughter. Most of my brothers, while of personal significance to me, will not feature much in this tale; their lives have not been much intertwined with my career.

The exception is Andrew, whom I have already mentioned; he is the one from whom I pinched the penknife. He, more than any, was my earnest partner in all the things of which my mother despaired. When Andrew heard of my bloody endeavours behind the hayrick, he was impressed as only an eight-year-old boy can be, and insisted I keep the knife as a trophy of my deeds. That, I no longer have; it deserves a place of honor alongside Greenie and Gotherham, but I lost it in the swamps of Mouleen. Not before it saved my life, however, cutting me free of the vines in which my Labane captors had bound me, and so I am forever grateful to Andrew for the gift.

I am also grateful for his assistance during our childhood years, exercising a boy’s privileges on my behalf. When our father was out of town, Andrew would borrow books out of his study for my use. Texts I myself would never have been permitted thus found their way into my room, where I hid them between the mattresses and behind my wardrobe. My new maid had too great a terror of being found off her feet to agree to the old deal, but she was amenable to sweets, and so we settled on a new arrangement, and I read long into the night on more than one occasion.

The books he took on my behalf, of course, were nearly all of natural history. My horizons expanded from their winged beginnings to creatures of all kinds: mammals and fish, insects and reptiles, plants of a hundred sorts, for in those days our knowledge was still general enough that one person might be expected to familiarize himself (or in my case, herself ) with the entire field.

Some of the books mentioned dragons. They never did so in more than passing asides, brief paragraphs that did little more than develop my appetite for information. In several places, however, I came across references to a particular work: Sir Richard Edgeworth’s A Natural History of Dragons. Carrigdon & Rudge were soon to be reprinting it, as I learned from their autumn catalogue; I risked a great deal by sneaking into my father’s study so as to leave that pamphlet open to the page announcing the reprint. It described A Natural History of Dragons as “the most indispensable reference on dragonkind available in our tongue”; surely that would be enough to entice my father’s eye.

My gamble paid off, for it was in the next delivery of books we received. I could not have it right away—Andrew would not borrow anything our father had yet to read—and I nearly went mad with waiting. Early in winter, though, Andrew passed me the book in a corridor, saying, “He finished it yesterday. Don’t let anyone see you with it.”

I was on my way to the parlor for my weekly lesson on the pianoforte, and if I went back up to my room I would be late. Instead I hurried onward, and concealed the book under a cushion mere heartbeats before my teacher entered. I gave him my best curtsy, and thereafter struggled mightily not to look toward the divan, from which I could feel the unread book taunting me. (I would say my playing suffered from the distraction, but it is difficult for something so dire to grow worse. Although I appreciate music, to this day I could not carry a tune if you tied it around my wrist for safekeeping.)

Once I escaped from my lesson, I began in on the book straightaway, and hardly paused except to hide it when necessary. I imagine it is not so well-known today as it was then, having been supplanted by other, more complete works, so it may be difficult for my readers to imagine how wondrous it seemed to me at the time. Edgeworth’s identifying criteria for “true dragons” were a useful starting point for many of us, and his listing of qualifying species is all the more impressive for having been assembled through correspondence with missionaries and traders, rather than through firsthand observation. He also addressed the issue of “lesser dragonkind,” namely, those creatures such as wyverns which failed one criterion or another, yet appeared (by the theories of the period) to be branches of the same family tree.

The influence this book had upon me may be expressed by saying that I read it straight through four times, for once was certainly not enough. Just as some girl-children of that age go mad for horses and equestrian pursuits, so did I become dragon-mad. That phrase described me well, for it led not only to the premier focus of my adult life (which has included more than a few actions here and there that might be deemed deranged), but more directly to the action I engaged in shortly after my fourteenth birthday.

]]>https://www.tor.com/2012/12/13/a-natural-history-of-dragons-excerpt/feed/5With Fate Conspire (Excerpt)https://www.tor.com/2011/08/02/with-fate-conspire-excerpt/
https://www.tor.com/2011/08/02/with-fate-conspire-excerpt/#commentsTue, 02 Aug 2011 17:00:00 +0000http://www.tor.com/2011/08/02/with-fate-conspire-excerpt/Seven years ago, Eliza's childhood sweetheart vanished from the streets of Whitechapel. No one believed her when she told them that he was stolen away by the faeries.
But she hasn't given up the search. It will lead her across London and into the hidden palace that gives refuge to faeries in the mortal world. That refuge is now crumbling, broken by the iron of the underground railway, and the resulting chaos spills over to the streets above.
Three centuries of the Onyx Court are about to come to an end. Without the palace's protection, the fae have little choice but to flee. Those who stay have one goal: to find safety in a city that does not welcome them. But what price will the mortals of London pay for that safety?]]>

Please enjoy this excerpt from With Fate Conspire by Marie Brennan, out August 30th from Tor Books. It is the latest installment in the Onyx Hall series.

***

PROLOGUE

The Onyx Hall, London: January 29, 1707

The lights hovered in midair, like a cloud of unearthly fireflies. The corners of the room lay in shadow; all illumination had drawn in- ward, to this spot before the empty hearth, and the woman who stood there in silence.

Her right hand moved with absent surety, coaxing the lights into position. The left hung stiff at her side, a rigid claw insufficiently masked by its glove. Without compass or ruler, guided only by bone-deep instinct, she formed the lights into a map. Here, the Tower of London. To the west, the cathedral of St. Paul’s. The long line of the Thames below them, and the Walbrook running down from the north to meet it, passing the London Stone on its way; and around the whole, touching the river on both sides, the bent and uneven arc of the city wall.

For a moment it floated before her, brilliant and perfect.

Then her fingertip reached up to a northeastern point on the wall, and flicked a few of the lights away.

As if that had been a summons, the door opened. Only one person in all this place had the right to interrupt her unannounced, and so she stayed where she was, regarding the newly flawed map. Once the door was closed, she spoke, her voice carrying perfectly in the stillness of the room. “You were unable to stop them.”

“I’m sorry, Lune.” Joseph Winslow came forward, to the edge of the cool light. It gave his ordinary features a peculiar cast; what would have seemed like youth in the brightness of day—more youth than he should claim—turned into strange agelessness under such illumination. “It is too much in the way. An impediment to carts, riders, carriages, people on foot . . . it serves no purpose anymore. None that I can tell them, at least.”

The silver of her eyes reflected blue as she traced the line of the wall. The old Roman and medieval fortification, much patched and altered over the centuries, but still, in its essence, the boundary of old London.

And of her realm, lying hidden below.

She should have seen this coming. Once it became impossible to crowd more people within the confines of London, they began to spill outside the wall. Up the river to Westminster, in great houses along the bank and pestilential tenements behind. Down the river to the shipbuilding yards, where sailors drank away their pay among the warehouses of goods from foreign lands. Across the river in Southwark, and north of the wall in suburbs—but at the heart of it, always, the City of London. And as the years went by, the seven great gates became ever more clogged, until they could not admit the endless rivers of humanity that flowed in and out.

In the hushed tone of a man asking a doctor for what he fears will be bad news, Winslow said, “What will this do to the Onyx Hall?”

Lune closed her eyes. She did not need them to look at her domain, the faerie palace that stretched beneath the square mile enclosed by the walls. Those black stones might have been her own bones, for a faerie queen ruled by virtue of the bond with her realm. “I do not know,” she admitted. “Fifty years ago, when Parliament commanded General Monck to tear the gates from their hinges, I feared it might harm the Hall. Nothing came of it. Forty years ago, when the Great Fire burned the entrances to this place, and even St. Paul’s Cathedral, I feared we might not recover. Those have been rebuilt. But now . . .”

Now, the mortals of London proposed to tear down part of the wall—tear it down, and not replace it. With the gates disabled, the City could no longer protect itself in war; in reality, it had no need to do so. Which made the wall itself little more than a historical curiosity, and an obstruction to London’s growth.

Perhaps the Hall would yet stand, like a table with one of its legs broken away.

Perhaps it would not.

“I’m sorry,” Winslow said again, hating the inadequacy of the words. He was her mortal consort, the Prince of the Stone; it was his privilege and duty to oversee the points at which faerie and mortal London came together. Lune had asked him to prevent the destruction of the wall, and he had failed.

Lune’s posture was rarely less than perfect, but somehow she pulled herself even more upright, her shoulders going back to form a line he’d come to recognize. “It was an impossible task. And perhaps an unnecessary one; the Hall has survived difficulties before. But if some trouble comes of this, then we will surmount it, as we always have.”

She presented her arm to him, and he took it, guiding her with formal courtesy from the room. Back to their court, a world of faeries both kind and cruel, and the few mortals who knew of their presence beneath London.

Behind them, alone in the empty room, the lights drifted free once more, the map dissolving into meaningless chaos.

Part One

February–May 1884

I behold London; a Human awful wonder of God!

—William Blake,Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

Oh City! Oh latest Throne! where I was rais’d To be a mystery of loveliness Unto all eyes, the time is well nigh come When I must render up this glorious home To keen Discovery: soon yon brilliant towers Shall darken with the waving of her wand; Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts, Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand, Low-built, mud-walled, Barbarian settlement, How chang’d from this fair City!

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Timbuctoo”

A great town is like a forest—that is not the whole of it that you see above ground.

—Mr. Lowe, MP, address at the opening of the Metropolitan Railway, reported in the Times, January 10, 1863

Given enough time, anything can become familiar enough to be ignored.

Even pain.

The searing nails driven through her flesh ache as they always have, but those aches are known, enumerated, incorporated into her world. If her body is stretched upon a rack, muscles and sinews torn and ragged from the strain, at least no one has stretched it further of late. This is familiar. She can disregard it.

But the unfamiliar, the unpredictable, disrupts that disregard. This new pain is irregular and intense, not the steady torment of before. It is a knife driven into her shoulder, a sudden agony stabbing through her again. And again. And again.

Creeping ever closer to her heart.

Each new thrust awakens all the other pains, every bleeding nerve she had learned to accept. Nothing can be ignored, then. All she can do is endure. And this she does because she has no choice; she has bound herself to this agony, with chains that cannot be broken by any force short of death.

Or, perhaps, salvation.

Like a patient cast down by disease, she waits, and in her lucid moments she prays for a cure. No physician exists who can treat this sickness, but perhaps—if she endures long enough—someone will teach himself that science, and save her from this terrible death by degrees.

So she hopes, and has hoped for longer than she can recall. But each thrust brings the knife that much closer to her heart.

One way or another, she will not have to endure much more.

The monster city seethed with life. Its streets, like arteries both great and small, pulsed with the flow of traffic: hackneys and private car-riages, omnibuses bursting with riders inside and out, horse trams rattling past on their iron rails. People on foot, on horseback, on the improbable wheels of bicycles. On the river, ships: forests of masts and steam funnels, skiffs hauling cargo to and fro, ferries spilling passengers onto piers that thrust out from the stinking foreshore. Trains thundered in from the suburbs and back out again, the population rising and falling, as if the city breathed.

The air that filled its lungs was humanity, of countless different kinds. The high and the low, glittering with diamonds or the tears of despair, speaking dozens of languages in hundreds of accents, living cheek by jowl, above and below and beside one another, but occupying entirely different worlds. The city encompassed them all: living and dying, they formed part of the great organism, which daily threatened to strangle on its simultaneous growth and rot.

This was London, in all its filth and glory. Nostalgic for the past, while yearning to cast off the chains of bygone ages and step forward into the bright utopia of the future. Proud of its achievements, yet despising its own flaws. A monster in both size and nature, that would consume the unwary and spit them out again, in forms unrecognizable and undreamt.

London, the monster city.

The City of London: February 26, 1884

“Hot buns! A farthing apiece, warm you on a cold morning! Will you buy a bun, sir?”

The cry rose into the air and was lost among others, like one bird in a flock. A burst of steam from the open cut alongside Farringdon Road heralded the arrival of a subterranean train; a minute later, the station above disgorged a mass of men, joining those carried into the City by the power of their own feet. They shuffled along Snow Hill and up onto Holborn Viaduct, yawning and sleepy, their numbers sufficient to stop carriages and omnibuses when they flooded across the street crossings.

A costerwoman’s voice had to be strong, to make itself heard above the voices and footsteps and the church bells ringing seven o’clock. Filling her lungs, Eliza bellowed again, “Hot buns! Hot from the oven! Only a farthing apiece!”

One fellow paused, dug in his pocket, handed over a penny. The four buns Eliza gave in exchange had been hot when she collected her load an hour ago; only the close-packed mass of their fellows had preserved any heat since then. But these were the clerks, the ink-stained men who slaved away in the City’s halls of business for long hours and little pay; they wouldn’t quibble over the truth of her advertising. By the time their wealthier betters came in to work, three hours or so from now, she would have sold her stock and filled her barrow with something else.

If all went well. Good days were the ones where she traced the streets again and again, with new wares every round: laces for boots and stays, lucifers, even larks one time. Bad days saw her peddling cold, stale buns at sundown, with no comfort save the surety that at least she would have something to eat that night. And sometimes a doss-house keeper could be persuaded to take a few as payment, in exchange for a spot on his bench.

Today was beginning well; even a bun of only moderate warmth was a pleasant touch on a cold morning like this one. But chill weather made men sullen in the afternoon and evening, turning up their collars and shoving their hands into pockets, thinking only of the train or omnibus or long walk that would take them home. Eliza knew better than to assume her luck would hold.

By the time she reached Cheapside, following the crowds of men on their way to the countinghouses, the press in the streets was thinning; those still out were hurrying, for fear their pay would be docked for lateness. Eliza counted her coins, stuck an experimental finger among the remaining buns, and decided they were cold enough that she could spare one for herself. And Tom Granger was always willing to let her sit a while with him.

She retraced her steps to the corner of Ivy Lane, where Tom was halfheartedly waving copies of The Times at passersby. “You’ll never sell them with that lazy hand,” Eliza said, stopping her barrow alongside.

She had just taken a large bite; it caught in her throat, and for a moment she feared she would choke. Then it slid down, and she hoped that if Tom saw her distress, he’d chalk it up to that. “Where?”

Tom had already crammed half the bun in his own mouth. His answer was completely unintelligible; she had to wait while he chewed enough to swallow. “Victoria Station,” he said, once he could speak more clearly. “Right early this morning. Blew the booking office and all ’alfway to the moon. Nobody ’urt, though—pity. We sells more papers when there’s dead people.”

“Who did it?”

He shrugged, then turned away to sell a paper to a man in a carpenter’s flannel coat. That done, he said, “Harry thinks it was a gas pipe what blew, but I reckon it’s the Fenians again.” He spat onto the cobblestones. “Fucking micks. They sells papers, I’ll give ’em that, but ’em and their bleeding bombs, eh?”

“Them and their bleeding bombs,” Eliza echoed, staring at the remnants of her bun as if it needed her attention. She had lost all appetite, but forced herself to finish anyway. I missed it. While I slept tied to a bench, he was here, and I missed my chance.

Tom rattled on about the Irish, allowing as how they were devilish strong buggers and good at hard labor, but one paddy had come up the other day, bold as you please, and tried to get papers to sell. “Me and Bill ran ’im off right quick,” Tom said.

Eliza didn’t share his satisfaction in the slightest. While Tom spoke, her gaze raked the street, as if frantic effort now could make up for her failure. Too late, and you know it. What would you have done anyway, if you’ d been here last night? Followed him again? Much good that did last time. But you missed your chance to do better. It took her by surprise when Tom left off his tirade and said, “Three months, it’s been, and I still don’t get you.”

She hoped her stare was not as obviously startled as it felt. “What do you mean?”

Tom gestured at her, seeming to indicate both the ragged clothing and the young woman who wore it. “You. Who you are, and what you’re doing ’ere.”

She was suddenly far colder than could be explained by the morning air. “Trying to sell buns. But I think I’m about done in for these; I should go for fried fish soon, or something else.”

“Which you’ll bring right back ’ere. Maybe you’ll go stand around the ’ospital, or the prison, but you’ll stick near Newgate as long as you can, so long as you’ve got a few pennies to buy supper and a place to sleep. Them fine gents like to talk about lazy folks as don’t care enough to earn a better wage—but you’re the only one I’ve ever met where it’s true.” Tom scratched his neck, studying her in a way that made her want to run. “You don’t drop your aitches, you ain’t from a proper coster family—I know they runs you off sometimes, when you steps on their territory—in short, you’s a mystery, and ever since you started coming ’ere I’ve been trying to work you out. What’s around Newgate for you, Elizabeth Marsh, that you’ll spend three months waiting for it to show up?”

Her fingers felt like ice. Eliza fumbled with the ends of her shawl, then stopped, because it only drew attention to how her hands were shaking. What was there to fear? No crime in hanging about, not so long as she was engaged in honest work. Tom knew nothing. So far as he was aware, she was simply Elizabeth Marsh, and Elizabeth Marsh was nobody.

But she hadn’t thought up a lie for him, because she hadn’t expected him to ask. Before her mind could settle down enough to find a good one, his expression softened to sympathy. “Got someone in Newgate, ’ave you?”

He jerked his chin westward as he said it. Newgate in the specific sense, the prison that stood nearby. Which was close enough to a truth—if not the real truth—that Eliza seized upon it with relief. “My father.”

“Thought it might be an ’usband,” Tom said. “You wouldn’t be the first mot walking around without a ring. Waiting for ’im to get out, or ’oping ’e won’t?”

Eliza thought about the last time she’d seen her father. Four months ago, and the words between them weren’t pretty—they never were—but she’d clean forgotten about that after she walked out of the prison and saw that familiar, hated face.

She shrugged uncomfortably, hoping Tom would let the issue drop. The more questions she answered, the more likely it was that he’d catch a whiff of something odd. Better to leave it at a nameless father with an unnamed crime. Tom didn’t press, but he did pick up one of his newspapers and begin searching through a back page. “ ’Ere, take a look at this.”

The piece above his ragged fingernail was brief, just two short paragraphs under the header MR. CALHOUN’S NEW FACTORY. “Factory work ain’t bad,” Tom said. “Better than service, anyway—no missus always on you, and some factories pay more—and it would get you out of ’ere. Waiting around won’t do you no good, Lizzie, and you keeps this up, sooner or later your luck’ll go bad. Workhouse bad.”

“Ah, you’re just trying to get rid of me,” Eliza said. It came out higher than usual, because of the tightness in her throat. Tom was just useful; his corner was the best one to watch from. She never intended more than that—never friendship—and his kindness made her feel all the more guilty about her lies.

But he was right, as far as it went. She’d been in service before, to an Italian family that sold secondhand clothes in Spitalfields. Being a maid-of-all-work, regardless of the family, was little better than being a slave. Lots of girls said factory work was preferable, if you could get it. But abandoning Newgate . . .

She couldn’t. Her disobedient eyes drifted back to the advertisement anyway. And then she saw what lay below, that Tom’s hand had covered before.

LONDON FAIRY SOCIETY—A new association has formed in Islington, for the understanding of Britain’s fast-vanishing fairy inhabitants. Meetings the second Friday of every month at 9 White Lion St., 7 p.m.

Eliza only barely kept from snatching the paper out of Tom’s hands, to stare at the words and see if they vanished. “May I?” she asked.

She meant only to read it again, but Tom handed her the paper and flapped his hands in its wake. “Keep it.”

The cold had gone; Eliza felt warm from head to toe. She could not look away from the words. Coincidence—or providence? It might be nothing: folk with money babbling on about little “flower fairies,” rather than faeries, the kind Eliza knew all too well. This new society might not know anything that could help her.

But her alternative was waiting around here, with the fading hope that it would do her any good. Just because there’d been another bombing didn’t mean any of the people involved had been here; it could have been pure chance last October, spotting him in Newgate. She’d spent nearly every day here since then, and not caught so much as another glimpse. They were tricksy creatures, faeries were, and not easily caught. But perhaps this London Fairy Society could help her.

“Thank you,” Eliza told Tom, folding the newspaper and stuffing it into the sagging pocket of her shawl.

He shrugged, looking away in embarrassment. “Ah, it’s nothing. You feeds me buns enough; I owes you a newspaper’s worth, at least.”

She wasn’t thanking him for the paper, but saying so would only make him more awkward. “I’d best be moving,” Eliza said. “These buns won’t sell themselves. But I’ll think about the factory, Tom; I will.” She meant it, too. It would be glorious to go back to something like normal life. No more of this hand-to-mouth existence, gambling everything on the hope of a second stroke of luck. After these three months, she’d even go back into service with the DiGiuseppes, just to know each night that she’d have a roof over her head.

If a normal life was even possible anymore, after everything she’d been through. But that was a question for the future. First, she had to catch herself a faerie.

Tom wished her well, and she gripped the handles of her barrow again, wheeling it down Newgate toward a fellow in Holborn who would sell her fried fish, if she could dispose of the rest of her current load. Her eyes did their habitual dance over the crowds as she cried her wares, but saw nothing unusual.

Second Friday. That’ll be the fourteenth, then. A bit more than a fortnight away. She’d keep on here until then, on the off chance that her luck would turn even better. But Islington, she hoped, held the answers.

The Goblin Market, Onyx Hall: March 2, 1884

With a clicking of toenails upon cracked black stone, the dog trot- ted into the room of cages. A half dozen lined the narrow chamber, three on a side, mostly full with sleeping humans. In the nearest, a young girl lay alone on a floor of filthy straw, curled in upon herself. The dog drew nearer, sniffing. His nose brushed her hair, close by the cage’s wooden bars, and she jerked awake with a cry of fear.

The dog sat down on his haunches and studied her, tongue lolling just a little. It was as close to an appealing look as a scruffy thing like him could come; his black fur was untidy and matted, and a chunk had been torn from his left ear. But when he made no threatening move—merely sat and watched—the girl moved hesitantly from the corner where she’d retreated. Holding one hand out, she inched closer, until her hand was near enough to the bars for the dog to extend his nose and sniff politely. He even licked her dirty fingers, a brief, warm caress.

At that touch of kindness, the girl burst into tears.

“Oi there!”

The dog rose in a swift turn. A squat, ugly figure stood in the doorway, scratching the wiry hairs of his beard. “Get off it,” the goblin said, scowling at him. “ ’E wants to see you, and not on four feet.”

In the cage, the girl had retreated once more. The dog cast a brief glance over his shoulder at her, then sighed, a peculiarly human sound. Bending his head, he concentrated, and his body began to shift.

He heard a faint whimper from behind him as the transformation finished. However little reassurance his dog form had offered, as a man he was worse; Dead Rick knew that all too well. Ragged trousers stopped short of his bare feet, whose toenails curved thick and filthy to the floor. On his body he wore only a torn waistcoat, scavenged off a dead mortal; he hated the confining feel of sleeves on his arms. His hair was as dirty and matted as it had been when it was fur, and as for his face . . . he didn’t turn around. He might not be a barguest, with a devil’s flaming eyes, but he’d seen himself in a mirror; the hard slash of his mouth wouldn’t reassure anyone.

He could have changed elsewhere, out of sight of the girl. But she was better off learning this now, that even the friendliest creature down here couldn’t be trusted.

Gresh’s toothy smile would never be mistaken for friendly. “She’s a fine bit, ain’t she?” he asked as Dead Rick came toward him. “Bit old to be stealing out of a cradle, but ’er mother kept ’er there anyway, as they didn’t ’ave nowhere else to put ’er. Living sixteen to a room they was; now it’s just fifteen, and she gets this whole cage to ’erself. Better for everyone!”

Dead Rick doubted the girl would agree, or her mother. Then again, what did he know? Perhaps her mother was a gin-soaked whore, and would be glad enough for one less mouth to feed. The girl might be bought by some kind faerie, who wanted a human child to play with like a doll.

Or angels might fly out of your arse, whelp. But she wouldn’t age here, and disease would never touch her, which was more than anyone could say for life in the streets above.

He said dog like it was an insult—like Dead Rick should be ashamed of being a skriker. A habit he picked up from their mutual master. But there were advantages to being a dog; Dead Rick growled low in his throat, holding Gresh’s eyes, and sure enough the goblin backed down first. With grumbling complaints, but he came with Dead Rick, and left the girl to what peace she could find.

Laughter echoed off the stone around them as they went along, its source impossible to determine. The warren of the Goblin Market was packed full, fae and the human creatures they kept for entertainment or use; they crowded almost as close as the East End poor that that girl came from. For every faerie that flitted, going in search of a passage beyond the mortal world, another came here to London. To the Onyx Hall, twisted reflection of the City above, the palace that had once been the glory of faerie England—and now was their crumbling refuge against the progress of humankind.

Traces of that glory were still visible, in the sculpted columns and corner posts, the arches spanning high-ceilinged chambers, the occasional mosaic laid into the black stone of a wall. It had all seen hard use these centuries past, though. Much was cracked, or stained, or half-hidden behind the clutter of the refugees. Curtains strung on cord divided larger rooms into smaller, giving the illusion of privacy; fae defended treasured belongings or mortal pets against the greedy hands of their neighbors. But anything could be sold, if the price was good enough: a human child bargained for mortal bread, an enchanted mirror traded for drugs that could make even a faerie forget his troubles.

Gresh was right; Dead Rick didn’t need the goblin to tell him where to go. He knew his way through the warren blindfolded. The room he headed for had a broken floor, scuffed stone giving way to bare earth, into which someone had dug a pit; down at the bottom, a red-eared faerie hound, his muzzle stained with blood, seized a rat and shook the rodent until its back broke. The observers—mostly fae, a few mortals—roared him on. Dead Rick shoved through the crowd, making his way toward the short staircase that curved at the far end. By the time he reached it, Gresh had disappeared, into the wagering mass.

The staircase still showed a touch of refinement, though the balustrade’s carving had taken some beating over the ages. The room it led to showed a bit more than a touch, largely because the rat-fighting rabble weren’t allowed in. If its chairs were mismatched, some were at least carved of exotic wood, and the carpet on the floor was still vibrant with color. Silks draped along the walls helped cover the cracks behind, the signs of inevitable decay.

And there were only two people inside, one faerie and one mortal. The latter was dressed in a ridiculous parody of a footman’s livery, styles that would have been old-fashioned fifty years before, but that hardly mattered; the more important thing was that he was there, uselessly, feeding the self-importance of his master.

Who scowled at Dead Rick. Nadrett waited for the door to close, then said, “I expects you ’ere when I needs you. Not to ’ave to send my goblins searching for you all over the warren.”

He made an elegant figure, by Goblin Market standards. Not clad in patches and rags, nor parading around in a gaudy assortment of gypsy silks; his waistcoat might be red as children’s blood, but it was restrained in its tailoring. One had to look closely to notice the buttons of bone, the cuff links of knotted hair. He wore no coat, but did affect a gentleman’s silk top hat, adorned with a large pin of crystalline starlight.

None of which hid the fact that Nadrett had clawed his way to the top of the Goblin Market heap by a combination of cunning and brutality. Dead Rick was forced to lower his gaze. “Sorry. I was looking in on the cages—”

“You better not ’ave been touching my property.”

Dead Rick was no good at lying. His hesitation told enough, and Nadrett spat a curse. “That one ain’t ’ere to tithe bread. Got a buyer, wants a girl as stinks of mortality. You go licking ’er, she starts to smell of faerie instead, and then I don’t get as good a price.”

He should keep his mouth shut, but the words came out anyway. “I ain’t ’ere to help your coves in their perversions.”

Quick as a striking snake, Nadrett was there, inches from his face. “Yes, you are,” the faerie spat. “Because you serve me. Those perversions are where I makes my profit, see, and if I don’t profit, then I takes the difference out of your mangy hide. So it’s in your best interests to make sure my customers ain’t unhappy.”

Dead Rick opened his mouth to answer—stupid whelp; you never learn—and Nadrett’s hand closed on his throat. He might weigh a stone less than the skriker, but his grip was iron. “Cross me,” Nadrett whispered, “and I will destroy you. Everything you used to be. You’ll be like this forever, broken, crawling, serving whatever master whips you worst.”

Shame and fear twisted in his gut, like a worm, eating away at his pride. He felt a whine build, trapped under Nadrett’s hand, and rolled his eyes in desperation. When Nadrett let go, Dead Rick turned his head to the side, casting his gaze down. “I won’t cross you.”

His master laughed. “ ’Course not. You’ll do exactly what I says. And you’re in luck: I’ve got use for you today. Follow me.”

Hating himself for it, Dead Rick obeyed.

Their path was a long one, weaving through the shabby clamor of the Goblin Market. The constant, encroaching decay made it almost impossible to go anywhere directly; too many chambers and connecting passages had vanished. Whole sections were almost completely cut off, their only access being through patches too unsafe to traverse. A faerie who set foot there was liable to come out somewhere else entirely—or not come out at all.

London’s foundation is rotting out from underneath it, Dead Rick thought. People still told tales of the glories of the Onyx Hall, but that was all that remained: tales, and these decaying fragments. And the Goblin Market’s the most rotten of all.

The place Nadrett led him wasn’t quite Market territory, and wasn’t quite not. The night garden didn’t belong to anyone, except the refugees who slept on blankets beneath the overgrown trees. It lay in what had once been the heart of the Onyx Hall, and in past ages had been the favored haunt of courtiers. But now the Walbrook ran foul through its heart, and the flowers grew among choking weeds.

A trio of goblins lounged on a chipped bench, and rose when Nadrett came through the entrance arch. Scots, and not familiar to Dead Rick; he would have wagered human bread, if he’d had any, that they were newcomers. Temporary residents of the night garden, who’d sold their services to the Goblin Market—to Nadrett—in exchange for a leg up. “We’ve cleared it,” the leader said. “Got two fellows watching each of the other doors.”

Nadrett clapped him on the shoulder and turned to Dead Rick. “You knows your job. Get to it.”

He stared past his master, into the abandoned wilderness of the garden. “Who is it?”

“What does that matter? Some mortal. She’s none of your concern.”

Female, then. But not the little girl in the cage. Dead Rick swallowed, tasting bile. Not the little girl; just some other human who likely never did anything to bring this fate on herself.

The mere drawing of Nadrett’s breath was enough to prompt him. Grinding his teeth, Dead Rick shifted back to dog form, and ran out into the night garden.

A welter of smells filled his nose. The refugees might be gone for the moment, but their scents remained: hobs and goblins and pucks, courtly elves and nature-loving sprites, some so new they carried echoes of their homes with them. Cool soil, and the thick mat of vegetation that grew over it; once the garden had been planted with aromatic, night-blooming flowers—evening primrose, jasmine—and some of the hardier ones still survived. Up ahead lay the stinking Walbrook. The crumbling enchantments had mixed the buried river’s reflection with its polluted reality, poisoning the earth around it.

Dead Rick paused near one of the stream’s surviving footbridges, thinking he saw movement ahead. It proved to be just a faerie light, drifting aimlessly through the air. Most of them had abandoned the ceiling, where people said they used to form shifting constellations, but in the distance Dead Rick thought he saw a more solid glow.

He padded toward it, keeping to the underbrush. Yes, there was light ahead, behind that cluster of sickly apple trees. He sank to his belly and crawled forward one paw at a time until he could see.

The mortal was scarcely more than a girl, fifteen years old at most. She sat with her back to a stone plinth, knees pulled tight to her chest. Dead Rick wondered if she knew she was sitting on a grave. Her dress was reasonably fine; she ought to be able to read—but vines had grown over the inscription, making it easy to miss if she didn’t look for it. And her attention was elsewhere, scouring the surrounding area for signs of a threat.

Signs of him.

Faerie lights floated about the small clearing, as if trying to comfort her. They had just enough awareness to respond to others’ wishes; her fear might have drawn them. Or had she called them to her? Don’t ask questions, Dead Rick growled to himself. Don’t think of ’er as a person—just do your job.

The growl escaped his muzzle, without him intending it. The mortal gasped, rising to a wary crouch.

She shouldn’t ’ave been sitting in the light. She’ll be ’alf-blind once she runs.

So much the better for him.

Dead Rick growled again, this time with purpose. There was a gap in the hawthorn bushes; he snaked through it, making no sound, and snarled more sharply. Then circled further: another growl. To a frightened mind, it would sound like she was surrounded.

In every direction except one: the overgrown path that led away from the grave. And sure enough, she bolted.

He was running almost before she moved. She was human, and wearing a dress; he was a dog, and knew his way about the garden. A fallen tree had blocked the left-hand path years ago, so that even if she went that way—and he heard her try—in the end, she had to go right. And Dead Rick was there, waiting to harry her onward.

Nadrett had sent him to do this so often that it was almost routine. But the girl surprised him; she plunged through an overgrown holly bush, hissing as it raked her, to take a less obvious path. Dead Rick cursed inwardly. Two fellows watching each of the other doors—but were they watching all of them? Or only the ones that led anywhere anymore? The arch ahead opened on a corridor that went about fifty feet before fading into a bad patch of the Onyx Hall.

It had been fifty feet the last time he looked. It might be less now.

Dead Rick put on a burst of speed. A dry fountain near the wall gave him an advantage; he leapt up the enormous grotesque at the center, toenails scrabbling on the twisted stone, and launched himself through the air toward the arch. He landed with an almighty crash, but that served him well enough: he heard the girl stumble and fall, then claw to her feet and run in the other direction, away from whatever huge monster was lurking by the arch.

Huge, no. Monster, yes. That’s what I’ve become.

Dead Rick shook himself, as if his gloom could be shaken off like water. If he failed at this, Nadrett would see to it he was more than just gloomy.

He trotted rapidly along the girl’s trail, following her scent. His pause had given her time to get ahead, and in the absence of his snarls she’d gone quiet. The trail led him over the footbridge; he caught a whiff on the railing, as if she’d paused there, eyeing the filthy water. But for a girl in skirts, who likely couldn’t swim, it would just be unpleasant suicide; in the end she’d gone on.

Across an expanse of shaggy grass, almost as tall as he was. Dead Rick leapt over a fallen urn, hoping to cut her off. The gamble worked: she was coming down the path toward him. Renewed snarling sent her the other way, and now he knew how this would end. Normally he trapped them against the wall, but with a bit of herding . . .

She was nearing the end of her strength. Dead Rick quickened his own pace, baying like a wolf, and burst into the open almost at her heels. The girl flung herself across the torn ground, up the steps of a ruined pavilion, and fell sprawling across the boards of its floor. Dead Rick leapt—

Her scream tore through the air, and then stopped.

Dead Rick’s paws slammed down on her chest, and his jaws snapped shut just shy of her nose. The girl was rigid with terror beneath him, and her mouth gaped open, heaving again and again as if she were screaming still, but no sound came out.

For a moment, the desire was there. To sink his teeth into that vulnerable throat, to tear the flesh and lap up the hot blood as it fountained out. Death was part of a skriker’s nature. It would be easy, so long as he didn’t see her as a person—just meat and fear and a voice to be stolen.

But that was Nadrett’s way, and the Goblin Market’s. Clenching his muzzle until it hurt, Dead Rick backed off, slowly, stepping with care so his rough toenails wouldn’t scratch the girl through her dress.

Nadrett was leaning against one of the pavilion’s posts, tossing a small jar from hand to hand. “That’s a good one,” he said with a satisfied leer. “Prime stuff. That’ll fetch a good price, it will. Maybe I’ll even let you ’ave a bit of the profit, eh?”

If he had any pride left, Dead Rick would refuse it. Since he didn’t, he jumped down to the grass, passing Nadrett without so much as a snarl.